Aref Nammari (goplayer)'s blog/

WITTY AND SCATHING:

Philip Slater is an American actor, sociologist and writer. He has written
twenty plays and has acted in over thirty plays and films. He is the author
of the bestselling book on American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness.

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/a-message-to-israel-time_b_155978.html>

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/a-message-to-israel-time_b_1559
78.html#comments

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I can understand that after centuries of persecution it's satisfying for a

Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there's a codicil that

goes with that role. You don't get to act like a victim any more. "Poor

little Israel" just sounds silly when you're the dominant power in the

Middle East. When you've invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and

defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away

from them, it's time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your

right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of

their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and

they don't. You have sophisticated arms and they don't. You have nuclear

weapons and they don't. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn't play

well in Peoria.

(Yes, I know, we Americans should talk--always trembling in our boots about

terrorists and 'rogue states' and 'evil empires' when we have enough nukes

to blow up entire continents, and spend more on arms in an hour than most of

the world's nations spend in a year. But just because we're hypocrites and

Nervous Nellies doesn't mean you have to be).

Calling Hamas the 'aggressor' is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more

than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked

at will, starved of food, fuel, energy--even deprived of hospital supplies.

They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the

necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if

they didn't fire a few rockets back.

The Israel lobby has a hissy fit when anyone points out that Israel has been

borrowing liberally from the Nazi playbook, but to punish a whole nation for

the attacks of a few--which Israel has been doing consistently in Gaza--is a

violation of international law--a law enacted in response to the Nazi

practice. And please, spare us the hypocrisy--borrowed, I'm ashamed to

admit, from my own government--of saying 'every effort is made to avoid

civilian casualties'. When you drop bombs on a crowded city you're bombing

civilians. Bombs don't ask for ID cards. Bombs are civilian killers. That's

what they do. They're designed to break the spirit of a nation by

slaughtering families. They were used all through World War II by all sides

for that very purpose. And that's what they're intended for in Gaza.

And please, Israel, try to restrain yourself from using that ridiculous

argument, borrowed again from Bush (how low can you get?), that Hamas

leaders "hide among civilians", by living in their own homes. Apparently, in

the thinking of Israelis, they should all run out into an uninhabited area

somewhere (try to find one in Gaza), surround themselves with flares and

write in the sand with a stick, "Here I am!"

Yesterday you shelled three UN-run schools, killing several dozen children

and adults, despite the fact that the UN had given you the precise

coordinates of all its schools in Gaza. So much for 'taking every care to

avoid civilian casualties'. You seem to feel you can kill whomever you like,

whenever you like, and wherever you like, just because you have a blank

check from the United States. Every day this assault goes on you're

demonstrating contempt for the UN, the international community, and human

life. Talk about a rogue state.

You might also pay attention to the fact that your outdated policy of macho

bullying--the policy you've been following for decades--isn't working! The

Palestinians are human. They're not dogs you can beat into submission. The

worse you treat them, the more they'll fight back. That's what it means to

be human. The more you oppress people, the more people resist. We dropped

more bombs on Viet Nam than all the bombs dropped by all nations in World

War II. Not to mention napalm, herbicides and all kinds of sophisticated

land mines. But did they bow down and kiss the feet of their conquerors?

They did not.

You'll have to kill them all. And when you do, you may finally lose the

support even of the United States.

Remember that American support is based entirely on the notion that no

politician can win without the Jewish vote. But not all American Jews think

Israel is on a divine mission from God. A great many American Jews believe

in international law and justice.

I can understand how Israel could resent this lecture coming from an

American. After all, isn't this what we Americans did? Came into someone

else's country, slaughtered 95% of its inhabitants and took over? And didn't

we go all Nervous Nellie whenever they fought back, accusing them of

aggression to justify even more genocidal slaughter? And didn't we get away

with it?

Yes, but I'm sorry to tell you, Israel, you came on the scene too late.

Genocide just doesn't fly any more. I know it isn't fair, you have every

right to feel aggrieved about this, but the world's smaller, cowboys are

passé, and bullies aren't heroes any more.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/05/gaza-israel-palestinian-territories-lebanon-aid

A Context for Gaza

By Duncan Kennedy*

ZNet
February 05, 2009

Source: The Harvard Crimson



When I told a friend, a former section leader in a large Harvard
College course, that I had been offered a chance to do an op-ed for
The Harvard Crimson on Gaza, she identified two fairly common,
understandable undergraduate attitudes: "The situation is too
complicated and I can't make up my mind about it;" and "This is
controversial and there are differences of opinion. No side is
‘right.' "

I hope that the recent war, occurring at the beginning of the Obama
presidency, will lead to enough discussion of Israel and Palestine in
the Harvard community so that more of us feel able to take positions.
With that in mind, I will use my space to present a factual picture
one would think controversial, but which surprisingly is a matter of
consensus of "informed observers."

The Israeli "new historian" Benny Morris—a strong Zionist—has
documented the "Origins of the Palestine Refugee Problem." During
military operations in 1947 and 1948 against Palestinian resisters
and Arab invading armies trying ineffectually to prevent the creation
of a Jewish state, Jewish regular and irregular forces, sometimes
using carefully calibrated terror tactics, drove somewhere between
600,000 and 800,000 Palestinian men, women and children from their
villages, which they then leveled. After the war, they used force to
prevent any of them from returning. Then the new state summarily
confiscated their land and property for redistribution to Jews. The
remaining Arab population of Israel—now about 20 percent—eventually
received formal legal equality, but live in second-class citizen
status similar to that of American blacks in the North before
affirmative action and the rise of the new black bourgeoisie.

In 1967, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and
occupied the West Bank and Gaza, largely populated by refugees of
1948, as well as East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai (later
returned to Egypt). This generated another approximately 200,000
Palestinian refugees who were also forbidden to return. Since 1973,
Israeli governments have gradually moved about 400,000 Jewish
settlers into the West Bank and another 200,000 into East Jerusalem,
appropriating about 50 percent of the land (when roads and other
infrastructure are taken into account), taking over the water, and
alternately exploiting and starving the West Bank and Gaza economies
to the point where the Arab population is overwhelmingly dependent on
the international "donor community" for subsistence.

Palestinian non-violent and violent resistance to the military
occupation is fully legal under international law. On the other hand,
many of the specific tactics, especially airplane hijacking, suicide
bombing targeting civilians, including children and old people, and
indiscriminate rocket attacks, have been widely denounced as criminal.

The Israeli government justifies the wall, check points, the network
of access roads, the discriminatory legal regime, the pass laws,
arbitrary arrests, house demolitions, targeted assassinations,
torture, and everyday military control as necessary for the security
of the settlements (viewed as illegal everywhere but in Israel), and
to protect against terrorism inside Israel. The international human
rights NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the
United Nations that have denounced Palestinian terror tactics have
unanimously condemned Israel on many occasions for violating the
human rights of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

After Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza in 2005, it retained
full control of land and sea borders and of the air space. It
periodically entered the territory with the goal of suppressing
rocket fire aimed indiscriminately at southern Israeli towns. Over
the four years before the December 2008 invasion, this rocket fire
killed 13 Israeli civilians and made life miserable for tens of
thousands of inhabitants of the towns targeted.

After Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Israel
and the U.S. set out to isolate Hamas by cutting off Gaza from the
outside world. The justification was that Hamas was a terrorist
organization "dedicated to the destruction of Israel." Israel and its
allies persisted in this strategy in spite of repeated indications,
reported faithfully in the New York Times, that Hamas, like the
Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat before it, was
looking for face-saving means to alter its position and accept a two-
state solution.

The economic and financial sanctions, including stop-and-go
electricity and fuel for the people and for institutions like
hospitals, along with Israeli restrictions of the movement of goods
and persons into and out of Gaza, destroyed what little productive
capacity the occupation had left in Gaza. It turned the territory,
according to the cliché, into a "prison camp," where the inmates were
dependent on charity and Israeli government whim to keep them
precariously one step away from "full fledged humanitarian crisis."
When this did not cause a revolt against Hamas in Gaza, Israel and
the U.S., according to an article in Vanity Fair not yet refuted,
organized a PLO coup, which failed, and led Hamas to expel the PLO
from Gaza. There was eventually a truce between Israel and Hamas.

The Hamas claim, which seems basically sound to me, is that Israel
was mainly responsible for its ending: Hamas suppressed almost, but
not all rocket fire; Israel retaliated for the residuum by refusing
to open the borders, so that Gazan misery continued unabated or
worsened, and then carried out an armed incursion in November 2008.
When Hamas refused to renew the truce and recommenced rocket fire,
Israel invaded.

Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes
during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is
important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including
400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli
casualties, as typical of a particular kind of "police action" that
Western colonial powers and Western "ethno-cratic settler regimes"
like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly
apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince
resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they
will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and
1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under
the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces
in asymmetric warfare. The outright "crimes," like the My Lai
massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in
Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily
tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps,
meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling
houses and the people in them.

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is
to be done? If you are not already clear about what you think, it is
crucial to try to find out for yourself. If the situation is as bad
as I have painted, you might consider some small step, perhaps just a
contribution to humanitarian relief for Gaza, or e-mailing the White
House, or something more, like advocating for Harvard to divest.


* Duncan Kennedy '64 is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence
at Harvard Law School.

In an article entitled If Israel's weapons came through a tunnel published on Electronic Intifada Kathy Kelly writes:

French version follows the English one

Israel's impunity must end

Reports have made it clear that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to war crimes: a population denied all possibility of escape or self-defense has been starved, deprived of medical care, and massacred beyond the view of the media. Images and accounts of the results of these actions are now reaching us, and they are frankly unbearable. It is not a matter of "excesses" committed by a few soldiers, but rather of a deliberate policy that borders on ethnic cleansing. To quote a letter signed by 300 British-based academics and published in the Guardian January 16, " The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel's ongoing appropriation of their land and resources."

Israel's impunity must end. Neither humanitarian aid nor a call to extend the ceasefire will suffice. The blockade of Gaza must be lifted and Israel, together with its political and military leaders, must be tried for war crimes. We ask the French government and the French population to take all practical measures to force Israel to accept these demands, and, first of all, to define and apply to Israel a program of boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

We who have signed this text commit ourselves to cease all collaboration with Israeli institutions participating in the occupation, and declare our solidarity with those who in Israel struggle courageously for the human, social, and political rights of Palestinians.

Séraphin Alava, Professeur à l’Université Toulouse 2

Georges Audi, Directeur de recherche au CNRS

Michel Balabane, Professeur à l’Université Paris 13

Viviane Baladi, Directrice de recherche au CNRS

Etienne Balibar, Professeur émérite à l’Université Paris Ouest

Daniel Bensaïd, Professeur à l’Université Paris 8

Tsouria Berbar, Chercheuse à l’INSERM

Rudolf Bkouche, Professeur émérite à l’Université de Lille I

Edgar Blaunstein, Economiste

Michel Bonneu, Professeur à l’Université de Toulouse

Alain Brossat, Professeur à l’Université Paris 8

Eve Caroli, Professeur à l’Université Paris-Ouest, membre de l’Institut Universitaire de France

Hélène Carteron, Ingénieure à l’INSERM, Paris

Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Professeure émérite à l’Université Paris 7

Ivar Ekeland, Président honoraire de l’Université Paris-Dauphine

Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, Juriste, collaboratrice parlementaire

Dominique Fougeyrollas, Chargée de recherche au CNRS

Nicole Gabriel, Maître de conférences à l’Université Paris 7

Marie-Madeleine Gombert, Chargée de recherche au CNRS

Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Directrice de Reid Hall, Université de Columbia à Paris

Boutros Hallaq, Professeur à l’Université Paris 3

Michael Harris, Professeur à l’Université Paris 7, membre de l’Institut Universitaire de France

Jacques Henry, Maïtre de conférences honoraire, Université de Paris Sud

Bernard Jancovici, Professeur émérite à l’Université Paris Sud

Alain Joxe, Directeur d’Études à l’EHESS

Baudoin Jurdant, Professeur à l’Université Paris 7

Sylvia Klingberg, Ingénieure d’étude à l’INSERM

Lydie Koch-Miramond, astrophysicienne, conseillère scientifique de la Commission à l’énergie

Hubert Krivine, Maître de conférences à l’ Université Paris 6

Michelle Lanmuzel, Professeur de lettre

Pierre Lantz, Professeur émérite à l’Université Paris 8

Ariane Lantz, Professeur honoraire de philosophie

Juliette Leblond, Directrice de recherche au CNRS

Catherine Lévy, Chercheuse au CNRS (Paris I)

Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, Professeur émérite à l’Université de Nice-Sophia-Antipolis

Roland Lombard, Directeur de recherche au CNRS, Président du CICUP

Aïcha Maherzi, Directrice de recherche au CREFI, Toulouse

Joëlle Maillefert, PRAG à l’IUT de Cachan

Bernard Maitte, Professeur à l’Université Lille I

Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, Chercheuse à l’EHESS

Annie Najim, Professeure à l’Université de Bordeaux 3

André Nouschi, Professeur honoraire à l’Université de Nice

Olivier Pène, Directeur de recherche honoraire au CNRS

Véronique de Rudder, Chargée de recherche au CNRS

Emmanuel Rollinde, Maître de conférences à l’Université Paris 6

Alain Romey, Professeur à l’Université de Nice-Sophia-Antipolis

Catherine Samary, Maître de conférences à l’Université Paris-Dauphine

Pierre Schapira, Professeur à l’Université Paris 6

Marie-Ange Schiltz, Ingénieure de recherche au CNRS

Geneviève Sellier, Professeure à l’Université de Caen, membre de l’Institut Universitaire de France

Alexis Tadié, Professeur à l’Université Paris 4, ancien directeur de la Maison Française d’Oxford

Françoise Thébaud, Professeure à l’université d’Avignon, membre de l’Institut Universitaire de France

Gérard Toulouse, Directeur de recherche au CNRS, membre de l’Académie des Sciences

Odile Vacher, Maître de conférences à l’Université Paris XI

Eleni Varikas, Professeur à l’Université Paris 8

Tassadit Yacine, Directrice d’étude à l’EHESS