“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
- Nelson Mandela
Gaza
Nelson Mandela would have been 96 on Friday. His quote on the Palestinians came after South Africa had shaken off the shackles of apartheid. The Palestinians remain oppressed 66 years after they were driven from their homes during the civil war for Palestine and the first Arab-Israeli War. Their situation parallels that of black South Africans in many ways. As was the case with South Africa, the US is late in denouncing oppression in the Occupied Territories.
Bad as the general situation of the Palestinians is, the conditions in Gaza border on the horrific. The UN estimates that Gaza will become unlivable by 2020. Both the EU and the US are complicit in the situation. When Palestinian elections brought Hamas to power in the Occupied Territories in 2006, the West decided to ignore the results and isolate the elected government, Abbas took power in the West Bank, and Israel instituted a devastating blockade on Gaza that continues to this day.
The current war against Gaza marks the third time in the last 5 years that Israel has bombed and invaded Gaza. After sabotaging the "Kerry" peace talks and after Hamas and the Palestinian Authority formed a unity government, Israel waited for an excuse to bring down the unity government and destroy Hamas. The weakening of the unity government was aided and abetted greatly by the West's actions. As Nathan Thrall writes in a July 17 Op-Ed for the New York Times: ...the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June....Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar most Gazans’ passage to the outside world.
The Israelis found their excuse for resuming hostilities against Hamas by wrongly blaming the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers on Hamas and then whipping up resentment and hatred of Palestinians to a fever pitch and assassinating seven members of Hamas. The IDF's killing of Palestinian civilians has not yet reached the level of 2008-9 invasion ("Operation Cast Lead") but the current ground invasion was proceeded by a particularly tragic incident in which four Palestinian children were killed by Israelis warplanes. How a nine year old playing hide and seek on a coastal road looks like a militant to one of the world's most powerful and sophisticated armed forces is incomprehensible.
And so the violence continues. As the editors of The Nation write: Achieving a cease-fire will be difficult, given the regional upheavals... But unless the deeper issues are addressed, the cycle [of impunity] will continue... Impunity is what happens when an aggressor fractures the norms of international law and basic human rights yet is never held to account, and so is free to commit the same crimes again and again. That is what we’re seeing now, and that is exactly what the Goldstone Report—the findings of the UN investigation of Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09—so presciently warned against. It said then that bringing to justice those who committed war crimes—Israel as well as Hamas—was perhaps the only effective way to prevent another round of violence. It was the United States that prevented Goldstone’s recommendations from getting a fair hearing in the UN—and it’s the United States, the world’s sole superpower, the key bankroller of Israel’s military, and the unconditional defender of Israel in international forums, that bears deep responsibility for the continuation of the decades-long occupation.
It is time for Hamas to accept the terms brokered by the international community if only to prevent additional Israeli war crimes. Hamas' refusal to accept an unconditional cease-fire - they want the release of the 400 political prisoners recently jailed by Israel and an end to the seven-year blockade - is apparently isolating them in the eyes of the international community. Unfortunately, much of the world is turning a blind eye to the Israeli atrocities and there is little hope that Israel will end the violence unless Hamas agrees to the unconditional cease fire. Of course, little mention is made in the Western press of the disproportionate Israeli response to the Hamas rocket firings: As Israel pressed ahead with a ground offensive in Gaza on Saturday morning, the death toll of Palestinians rose above 300, many of them children. An early morning air strike outside a mosque in the southern city of Khan Yunis killed seven people on Saturday, including a woman, emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said. Other raids shortly afterwards killed another four, bringing the total death toll to 307 Palestinians and two Israelis. [The Guardian, July 19] Most of the deaths have been civilians - estimated before the ground invasion to be on the order of 80%.
If Israelis are not held accountable for their crimes this time and if the West does not give strong support to the Palestinian unity government, there is little hope that the blockade on Gaza will ever be lifted or that Palestinians will ever have a viable homeland. With the death tolls being what they are and with the widespread destruction of civilian facilities and homes wreaked by Israeli bombings, it seems the IDF is a more effective terror organization than Hamas. It also seems incredible that the international community is not pressuring Israel to stop the onslaught against Gaza given that there is no effective resistance and no damage being done by Hamas rockets. Yes, Hamas is being obstinate but all the killing is being done by Israelis.
Malaysian Airlines MH17
Tragedies continue for Malaysian Airlines. Flight MH17 was apparently shot down by a missile in the Ukraine war zone. Both sides in the civil war deny responsibility. This is the kind of disaster that might have occurred over Syria had the US armed the rebels fighting the Assad regime with missile launchers as some of our stupider Congressional hawks were advising several months ago. Deutsche Welle lists five previous incidents of civilian air craft being shot down by missiles: the 1973 downing of a Libyan passenger plane by Israeli fighter jets, the 1980 Italian airliner brought down near Sicily (no admission of responsibility), the 1983 South Korean airliner shot down by Soviet fighter jets, the 1988 Iranian Airbus shot down by missiles from a US warship in the Strait of Hormuz, and the 2003 Russian airliner shot down by an accidentally fired Ukrainian missile during a military exercise in Crimea.
Iran
Iran and six world powers have agreed to a four-month extension of negotiations on a nuclear deal with Tehran after failing to meet a July 20 deadline due to "significant gaps" between the two sides, the European Union and Iran said on Saturday....It has been clear for days that Iran and the six powers would miss the Sunday deadline to reach an accord on curbing Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for the gradual lifting of sanctions due to disagreements on a number of key issues.
Among the issues dividing them are the permissible scope of Iran's nuclear fuel production capacity and how to address the country's suspected past atomic bomb research. [Al Jazeera, July 19] I hope I'm wrong. but I expect the next step for Congressional hawks and AIPAC-supported Senators will be to try to sabotage the talks by passing additional sanctions against Iran.
Brazil and the World Cup
After all the talk about Neymar and Brazil and about Messi and Argentina, it was methodical, "boring" Germany that came away with the 2014 World Cup. I watched, stunned with most of the world, as Germany dismantled Brazil in the semi-final with five goals over a span of 18 minutes in the first half. Germany went on to beat Argentina in overtime in the final and earned a #1 rating along with the World Cup. On July 14, Mother Jones ran an interview with Brazilian journalist Juliana Barbassa who discussed the soccer protests, the potential political fallout for president Dilma Roussef, and the rise of the Brazilian middle class. Now that the World Cup is over, will the protests return? It's very unpredictable...I do think people are more awake and aware about their rights and what's owed to them. I don't know if they're unhappy enough to change it...We haven't grown since 2010. Jobs are still plentiful. Inflation is rising, but it's not out of control. If those numbers start to change and people start to feel like they're going to the supermarket and they can't get as much as they used to—if it starts hitting people in the areas where it matters—I think that we might see more unrest.
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela's 96th birthday was celebrated Friday. The Nobel Peace Prize winner was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa. The Common Dreams website published a list of Mandela quotes you were not likely to see in the mainstream press remembrances of the man. Besides the quote above on the oppression of the Palestinians, here's another one of the dozen quotes in the article: “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”
Links
Where is the outrage? (July 16)
History of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict - World War I - 1949, 1950-2000, 2000-2012
