Israel: how to lose friends and alienate people
Israel is not behaving like a civilised nation; that inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as one. Even its strongest supporters must be finding it difficult to mount a positive case.
The third day of the bombardment of Gaza has taken the death toll to over 300, including four young sisters killed when a bomb aimed at a nearby mosque missed its target. Some 1,400 have been injured. Even as I write, warships are reportedly bombarding the strip’s rudimentary port facilities. Welcome to Operation Cast Lead.
There have been debates in many British trade unions – including my own, the National Union of Journalists – centred on demands for a labour movement boycott of the state of Israel. I now suspect that I have lacked clarity on this issue. Sadly, prevarication is no longer tenable.
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Israel: time for perspective and action
Conservative Home carries a couple of articles on the recent excesses of the Israeli military. Alex Deane loses himself in his eulogy to the State of Israel surrounded by “enemies who wish her ill”, this “sliver of democracy and decency has always held my sympathy” he informs the reader.
However, pick-up a Sunday paper and you can see that Israeli policy is pretty far from decency. If even the likes of Deane are feeling that supporting Israel is now “less straightforward” then serious questions have to be asked about how long the guilt-induced whitewashing of Israel’s actions can last.
Signs were emerging yesterday of a new consensus with all three parties criticising Israel’s recent air raids on the Gaza Strip. However, the crux of the question is what will emerge out of this new climate of criticism.
In other words, will we see concrete calls for increasing stringent sanction to be applied to Israel while it continues to violate international law with impunity?
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Israel has declared war on Palestine
Reuters reports:
Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second successive day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after 229 people were killed in one of the bloodiest 24 hours for Palestinians in 60 years of conflict with the Jewish state.
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Saturday’s death toll was the highest for a single day in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948, when the Jewish state was established.
Piling pressure on Hamas? These people really are stupid aren’t they? I would love to see Hamas become completely de-militarised but killing 229 people (so far) and injuring over 700 people is essentially a declaration of war.
Even Sky News points out that: “Dozens of people were killled when Israeli jets fired about 30 missiles into densely populated areas.”
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The Strange Death of Anti-War England
It hardly needs restating that the British pro-war coalition (a mixture of the most loathsome and internecine members of the left, along with a few gullible sops such as Johann Hari and, of course, the usual jingoist rightists) has shrunk and collapsed. Support for the war has tanked heavily over the past few years, and reduced into a pale shadow of the former polarity that left the country so heavily divided, that Radio 1 denied Hot Hot Heat’s best song the coverage it deserved due to its title and chorus being a reference to “Bandages”.
Anti-war sentiment, meanwhile, has swollen. The increasing crescendo of dissent was easily the largest single factor in driving Blair from office and without this ultimate, unforgivable betrayal there is little doubt that Labour would be in a far better position than their current predicament. Had Michael Howard opposed the War, there’s a sliver of a chance that he would be Prime Minister today, but it is unquestionable that Labour would have taken an even greater pounding. continue reading… »
Israel/Palestine – let’s have a sane debate
In all the long years I have taken an interest in politics, I have never come across any debate remotely as characterised by wilful distortion, obfuscation, over-emotionalism, deliberate bad faith, polarisation, ill-tempered malicious mudslinging and widespread playing of the man rather than the ball than the Israel/Palestine issue.
Sometimes it seems that enough straw men have been erected in this connection to populate a medium-sized city of the damn things, complete with commuter suburbs.
Trade union activists find themselves circulating hyperlinks to articles on the website of a well-known Ku Klux Klan boss, while the leader of one far left group feels constrained to defend every action of Israel’s rapacious and corrupt ruling class, even to the point of offering carte blanche in advance of planned aggression.
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The “smoking gun” Iraqi memo and Con Coughlin
The American journalist and writer Ron Suskind, formerly at the Wall Street Journal, has revelations in his latest book that the White House ordered the CIA in the middle of 2003 to forge a letter from Iraq’s former intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush, which was subsequently used as the smoking gun to prove links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida.
The letter claimed that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the September the 11th attackers, had trained in Baghdad at the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal’s camp, and that the Iraqi regime was deeply involved in the 9/11 plot.
The letter was the crudest of forgeries and has subsequently been exposed as such. It is however the first time that allegations have been made that the forging of the letter was authorised at the very highest levels of both the US government and the CIA itself. Suskind minces no words and suggests that is impeachment material.
All sides, it must be said, have denied it, and there are reasons to believe, as suggested in the Salon review of Suskind’s book, that this might be one of those stories that seem too good to be true because they are.
But here’s another twist to the tale. Rather than going to an American source with the letter, perhaps considering the fallout that was yet to come over the leaking of dubious intelligence to Judith Miller of the New York Times and others, the memo was given to a British journalist, the Telegraph’s Con Coughlin.
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Proud to be ‘indecent’
A guest-post over at Harry’s Place by ‘Ben’ advertises what it means to be a ‘Decent.’ Seemingly this is shorthand for someone who supports the war, is opposed to anyone further left than Jon Cruddas and genuinely thinks that the Parliamentary Labour Party should be staffed by people like Oona King.
With these blanket labels flying around, it is difficult to know the extent to which any given author is perpetrating a deliberate slander, or to which they’re simply caught up in their own misguided rhetoric.
I’m not sure which is the case when guest-poster Ben makes the following declaration about why he turned from Stopper to idiot:
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Study shows media bias on Iraq
An empirical study examining every story about Iraq on ABC and CBS News between 1st Aug 02 and 19th Mar ‘03 – 908 stories in all – showed the networks were biased towards invasion. More: The Monkey Cage.
Jewish group challenges AIPAC
A group of 100 officials, Jewish activists and academics have launched a new lobby in Washington to challenge the way AIPAC represents their views. Will it signal a shift in Middle East policy?
Refugees forced back to Iraq
The Home Office has won a landmark test case giving it the power to return refugees to war-torn parts of Iraq, including Basra and Baghdad.
Nick Clegg ties himself into knots over Iraq
The now infamous interview where Nick Clegg roughly talks about his sex life with Piers Morgan for GQ also has this exchange (via) on Iraq:
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‘The Unrecognized’ still unrecognized
A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.
Their story has been in the news again recently, due to a recent report by Human Rights Watch that renews the criticism of Israel’s discriminatory laws.
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Life in the Shadows
Our Man Inside has been to Jordan to photograph Iraqi refuges. Check out his amazing photoessay here:
Why Brown’s Iraq inquiry pledge – to me! – matters
I very much welcome Gordon Brown’s commitment to an inquiry ” to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath” – even aside from the unusual experience of this very welcome political development coming in correspondence between myself and the Prime Minister. (Naturally, one also expects that other Cabinet ministers will take note.
We were very pleased with last week’s budget commitments on child poverty and will be thinking about where else we should now be pressing for progress).
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Brown promises Iraq inquiry
In a response to Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society, Brown has accepted that the government will hold an inquiry on the Iraq war. The Indy has made it front page news. You can read the original letter and Brown’s response from here.
No link between Saddam and al-Qaeda
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
Symmetrical Outrage at Asymmetric Warfare
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inexorably hotting up again. In summer 2006 the flashpoint was northern Israel/southern Lebanon, now it is mid-Israel/Gaza. The dynamic of the current conflagration is similar to the previous one: Hamas/Hezbollah firing missiles at civilians in Sderot and Ashkelon/northern Israel; Israel responding with missiles and a ground invasion that causes many civilian deaths. In the current flare-up only a ground invasion of Gaza is lacking and that could well be about to happen.
This style of conflict reveals the sheer hopelessness of this kind of ‘asymmetric warfare’ in which the weaker party fights with crude weapons and has not a hope of total victory of the battlefield. Hamas’s crudely produced rockets cannot beat the Israeli military machine but can and do cause terror, injury and death to the people of Sderot and now Ashkelon. Israel’s mighty army can cause devastation for the people of Gaza on a greater scale than Hamas can manage, but it cannot prevent the rockets (it’s worth remembering that rockets were fired, albeit on a smaller scale, even when Israel was occupying Gaza). The hopelessness lies in the impossibility of victory for either side. Insofar as Hamas has a realistic political strategy, it is that decades of low-intensity warfare will perhaps weaken Israel’s desire to fight. Israel’s more realistic leaders admit that re-occupation of Gaza presents no ultimate solution. continue reading… »
Iraqi Employees: fine words, shabby deeds
Do you like reading fine words? Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007:
I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.
Fine words. What about deeds?
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Qaradawi and his visa
I know right-wingers have no consistent standards when it comes to free speech, but I’m yet to hear a good argument for why the cleric Al-Qaradawi, contemptible as his views are, should be denied a visa. After all, if we don’t want to listen to nastiness, we should stop the BNP too shouldn’t we?
Women’s rights… and annoying Trots
Associated Press is reporting that:
A gang-rape victim who was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her was pardoned by the Saudi king after the case sparked rare criticism from the United States, the kingdom’s top ally.
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Justice Minister Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Sheik said the pardon reported Monday by Saudi media does not mean the king doubted the country’s judges, but that he was acting in the “interests of the people.”
What he means is that western media outrage, which led to the issue being raised with President Bush, forced the Saudi king to back down. For the victim this is undoubtedly good news and I would hope this incident would make the Saudi legislative think again next time when they convict rape victims. Though, I doubt it. Governments are understandably reluctant to tell other countries how they should treat their own citizens, lest it comes back to haunt them.
For lefties there are (possibly) added dimensions to such stories.
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