By Dave Lindorff, ThisCantbehappening!

During the Vietnam War, which US forces fought from 1960 through 1974, and which cost the lives of several million Southeast Asians and 58,000 Americans, eight American journalists died. Not one of them was killed by American fire.

In the Iraq War, 136 journalists were killed. At least 15 of them — about 11% of the total — were killed by US forces, sometimes apparently with deliberate intent. (Consider that if some 500,000 US troops rotated through Iraq over the course of the way and 4000 of them were killed, that meant soldiers had a 1:125 chance of being killed there. With 136 dead journalists, there would have had to be more than 14,000 journalists covering the war for them to have the same odds of getting killed. It seems clear it is much more dangerous being a journalist in a US war than being a soldier!)

In Afghanistan, nine journalists have been killed, at least one by US forces, and in that case, the killing was deliberate, though it is unclear whether the victim was known to be a journalist.

One thing is clear: it is dangerous in the extreme to be a journalist covering America’s wars, at least beginning with Vietnam.

Why this might be the case is hard to say, but it seems that an antipathy towards journalists within the military may have something to do with it.

Back in 1983, the US, in one of the more ludicrous military actions in its long history of war, invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, on the pretext that it feared Cubans were building a military airbase there (actually Cuba had sent construction workers to the impoverished isle to help the country build a better commercial airport so as to improve its tourism business). During that invasion, which was conducted with a total media blackout despite almost no opposition (the main “enemy” putting up any resistance was a group of Cuban construction workers!), a group of seven journalists, including a reporter from the New York Times, attempted to reach the island on a small boat. They were blocked by a US destroyer, which warned them over a loudspeaker to turn around or be “blown out of the water.” The journalists gave up and retreated.

That little “war,” which was conducted from beginning to end with no reporters allowed in the battle zone, marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Pentagon and the press — one where the military maintains complete control over access and information, both what is provided to the media, and what the public gets to learn.

When the US launched its invasion of Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait in 1991, it required all journalists covering the attack to be “embedded” with US forces. Prior to that time (with the exception of the Grenada War mentioned above), journalists, for example in Vietnam, were free to go anywhere in the war zone and to report what they saw. They were not tied to, or restricted to, specific military units. They faced risks, but the risks, as evidenced by the deaths of war correspondents, were caused by either land mines they encountered, or by enemy fire, not by fire from US forces.

That all changed with the Iraq War in 2003. At that time, the Pentagon continued with the same methods developed in the Gulf War, requiring journalists to be “embedded” with specific invading, or later, occupying units. Those journalists who chose not to be embedded were warned that they were putting themselves at much greater risk of being targets.

We know, from documents that were obtained and released by Wikileaks, that the Bush-Cheney administration considered, but fortunately eventually decided against, bombing the main studio and office building of Al-Jazeera Television in Qatar in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were known to be furious at what they considered to be the biased reporting on that war by the Arab-language TV news organization. This aborted plan to blow up the whole station, which would have resulted in huge casualties, casts in a very suspicious light the rocket and machine gun attack on the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2002, during the US assault on Iraq’s capital city just a few weeks into the invasion. In that attack, Tareq Ayyaub, an Al-Jazeera cameraman, was killed and another journalist was injured. The US claimed it had inadvertently struck the Al-Jazeera building because of “shots fired from nearby,” but an investigation disclosed that Al-Jazeera had given the coordinates of its facility to US forces so it was known to be a press site, not a military target.

Furthermore, there was another attack that same day, this time by a US tank, which fired a 120 mm round at a balcony of the Palestine Hotel, where US forces knew that virtually the entire foreign press corps were holed up during the invasion. Killed on the balcony were Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and the Spaniard Jose Couso of Telecinco TV.

The ruthlessness of the slaying of journalists was exposed for all to see when the whistle-blower outfit Wikileaks released the now famous video it obtained from the gunsight camera of a US helicopter, whose crew opened up with machine gun fire on a group of men and two children in a Baghdad square. Two of those killed were cameramen working for Reuters. One of the two was literally hunted down and machine gunned after, already gravely wounded, he tried to crawl away, unarmed, to safety. The crew could be heard laughing as they killed him.

Several journalists were shot and killed at checkpoints by trigger-happy US forces, some, like Ali Abdul-Azia and Ali al-Khatib, two reporters with the Arab TV station Al-Arabiya, as they were driving away from the checkpoint on March 18, 2004, or Asaad Kadhim, a journalist with the Iraqi TV station Al-Iraqiya, shot as he was filming at a checkpoint near Samara in Iraq.

Reporter Ahmed Wael Bakri of Al-Sharqiya TV, a local station partly funded by the US, was killed by US troops because he “failed to pull over” for a US military convoy — a fate suffered by many an ordinary Iraqi civilian.

In Afghanistan, BBC journalist Omaid Khpalwak was killed by one US soldier after he had already been shot and wounded by another, despite the fact that he spoke English and had been trying to retrieve some ID from his jacket pocket. Khpalwak had been hiding for safety during a firefight he had been covering when he was initially shot by a US soldier. The second soldier had gone over to “check him out.”

Certainly in the fog of war, being a war correspondent is a dangerous profession. Fighters on either side of a conflict, who are being fired at themselves, are not in a position or a state of mind to spend a lot of time analyzing whether someone is an enemy fighter or a journalist, or even perhaps in poor visibility conditions, whether a what someone is carrying is a camera tripod or an RPG launcher. Furthermore, plenty of journalists have been killed, often deliberately, by Iraqi resistance fighters and by Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

That said, the incidence of journalists being killed by US forces in recent US conflicts has been much, much greater than it ever was in earlier wars, such as the one in Vietnam, or in Korea or World War II, which inevitably begs the question of whether some of the journalist killing has been deliberate, perhaps with the intent of keeping journalists in line.

Certainly the White House discussion about whether to bomb Al-Jazeera’s main offices shows that there is a willingness, all the way up to the top of the US government, to view journalists as the enemy, and even to contemplate killing some of them to affect the coverage of a war. The bombing of the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad in the early days of the US invasion appears to have been a brazen attempt to do just that.

In case after case, the evidence is too sketchy to say for sure that other killings of journalists by US troops were deliberate efforts to make sure other journalists stayed firmly — and safely — embedded with US soldiers, but the sheer number of those killed should at least raise the question.

Meanwhile, there is far less question of motive in the case of Israel, a close ally of the US, and a country whose military is closely linked to the Pentagon. During this latest Israeli assault and bombardment of the prison-territory of Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force fired several missiles directly at a building housing not only the Gaza Al-Aksa TV station, but a number of offices of foreign journalists. Two Al-Aksa cameramen were killed in the strike. Several other buildings housing foreign journalists have also been struck, and the Foreign Press Association for Israel and Palestinian Territories has stated that it believes the IDF is well aware of the locations of offices of foreign reporters in the territory. Israel has admitted to targeting the two Al-Aksa victims, claiming that working for the Hamas-owned station means they are Hamas “terrorists.” But as to whether the strikes on buildings occupied by foreign reporters is meant to be a message, or to keep them from covering the IDF attack on Gaza, that remains, like the US attacks on and killing of journalists, an open question.

DAVE LINDORFF is a veteran journalist currently associated with the information collective, This Cant Be Happening!

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by JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

It is a recurring nightmare. The sounds and smells are so familiar; the tension in the air so thick that you can see it like the grit and grime that collects on your clothes and shoes after being outside for only a short while.

In July, sand blows in off the shore whipping its tiny grains across your face until your eyes sting shut with tears. Drones buzz in the night sky and tracer flares speed past like little comets. In November there is a chill in the wind when the booms go off in the dusty overcrowded streets of Gaza. The killing is high speed and slow motion together; and later, in January, when the rains start, the streets will flood and the muck and debris of the earth surges upward making patterns of dirty, broken-lace detritus on the curbs and corners, unable to drain away quickly enough for easy passage. Dying in the cold and damp is worst of all when your limbs are left to bleed uncovered. Month after month, the leitmotif of death in all its creative varieties eats away at the people of Gaza.  Were it not so unnatural, we might wonder if the seasons had somehow been poisoned.

Forty-six-year-old Ahmad Jabari and his companion, Mohammad al-Homs, were together in their car when Israel incinerated them with the astonishing accuracy of its high-tech, precision-strike weapons. Were they conscious in those last seconds? Did an instant of suspended animation allow them to bid their world  good bye? On the dark side of the Manichaean universe into which we have cast them,  is it heresy to imagine they may have loved or have been loved; that mourning and bereavement would ensue? That whole families would be shattered again by death?   Israeli aerial attacks hit 20 targets on the first day alone of the latest operation to target alleged “missile silos,” weapons’ storehouses, and ‘terrorists’ the righteous can kill with particular impunity – like Jabari, whose position as head of the Qassam Brigades, or military wing of Hamas, could hardly merit condemnation.

Aerial strikes now soar into the hundreds and every non-combatant person is at risk. It is becoming more and more difficult to cover up the fact that the civilian population of Gaza, the families, children, shopkeepers, street vendors, pharmacists, doctors, construction workers, teachers, journalists, and others are not the ‘collateral damage’ in an angry war against “militants,” “terrorists,” and primitive rockets. Rather they are themselves the primary targets. They are the ones who must be culled from the land. The “militants” are merely the means to their demise. The ‘unpeople’ who clutter the land like trash are the genuine, singular targets of US-Israel foreign policy, standing as they do between the messy, inconvenient present and the most sacred and coveted of goals: rule over the land unencumbered by Arabs; access and control of the resources with no pretense of sharing; open spaces for development and investment and future profits. That the planners will also get tourist attractions of a bygone civilization whose cultural artifacts can be served up as souvenirs in shops with restaurants serving ‘native’ cuisine may have been unintended, but are opportune, byproducts.  When Gaza is flushed free of its human squalor and the land and resources reintegrated methodically into the Jewish State, quietly and without fanfare, America’s Israeli terror over the land will end, or so it is presumed. Events could still go this quietly, and Palestinians will be likened to the Sioux. Will it be so easy to assure?

Jabari  was a perfect Kill: easy to transform from unsuspecting passenger in a car to calculating killer. The top military brass in Tel Aviv and Washington understand this as well as the servile journalists and sycophants whose job it is to lull even half-interested TV viewers across an ocean with “narratives” based on lies. “By nature of his position, Jabari has been responsible over the past decade for all anti-Israel terror activity emanating from the [Gaza] Strip,” a Shin Bet security agent said to the Times of Israel. Guilt by title; and the appropriation of the language of good for the Good, and bad for the Bad. Such logic will lead us to the alternatives already available, based as they are on an Original Myth: disengage from the rest of the natives until they turn to grass and stone, or pretend they were never there to begin with and proceed accordingly anyway: A land without a people for a people without a land.

Since Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 the IDF has hit well over 1000 targets of “terror” in its self-defense against families and children. There is no reason we should have to imagine what this looks like in the painfully dilapidated territory of Gaza,  bombed and wrecked beyond repair  so often, so repeatedly, and with a wrath that defies comprehension that one has to ask how it is that people still go on with life as well as they do—lacking water, electricity, arable land, employment, safe homes, sewage plants, functioning flour mills and fresh air. There are a hundred thousand photographs of the pock-marked, bullet-sprayed buildings, homes, and mosques. There are over a thousand posters of the martyred Palestinian (and foreign) resistance fighters. There are shelves stacked and overflowing with video footage from various international media and endless records of the maimed, the imprisoned, the tortured and humiliated, the hospitalized, the bed-ridden and the dead. NGOs served a great purpose, historians will decide, in preserving the precise, detailed records of every name unjustly abused. There are the wounded souls themselves who carry a burden of unbearable loss; who weep in silence for the dead. A Palestinian Ghost Dance may conjure the ancestors of old but it will also offer more incentive to annihilate the eerie traces of human attempts at self-preservation. A manifest destiny is a bullet to the brain of a peaceful protester in Bil’in whose turn at Gaza is fast approaching.

* * *

Gaza again is a living hell, all of it on record for the world to see. The death toll is climbing by the hour. The photos are everywhere but the New York Times has only a paragraph on the fear Israeli children experience from the loud noises and clamor. You have forgotten the other half of humanity, Mr. Publisher. Not the other half, really; the other 9/10ths of the world. When will you comment on the trauma the Gazan child experiences, and repeatedly, with children across the world under the bombs of the United States and Israel?

All the sounds and sights and smells of slaughter verify the damage and danger of aerial assaults and targeted killings; Apartment buildings still buzzing with human activity when missiles pierced through their ceilings offer up their dead and wounded to the deafening skies. Progressive US President Barak Obama and his allies applaud Israel’s masterful techniques of preventive war as self-defense; its sophistication at using state of the art weaponry against mosques, homes, markets and schools; re-emphasize at press conferences the right of Israel to defend itself against the human cattle they have justly corralled into densely packed camps to be bound and slaughtered or starved and transferred elsewhere. All of it is happening again, today, before our very eyes; before the universal documents proclaiming the rights of mankind and international humanitarian law; before the leaders who have so eagerly abandoned due process and civil liberties but fear the rising tide of rebellion in the Middle East and elsewhere? How dare we pontificate on the atrocities of Damascus after sponsoring such a Juggernaut for Jerusalem? For Gaza? What educated public can still claim they didn’t know? How can anyone any longer pretend the earth was not boiling beneath us like lava under an active volcano?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FROM THE WIKI PROFILE:
Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[1][2] She is politically active in Madison, Wisconsin, and writes as a freelance journalist. Her work has been featured in scholarly publications such as The Journal of Palestine Studies,[3] and she is a regular contributor to CounterPunch magazine. Loewenstein is a sharp critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as well as American support for Israel, which has drawn accusations of being a “self-hating Jew” and anti-Semite from some critics.[4][5]

Loewenstein lived in Israel in 1963 as a child when her father played first trumpet in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. She went back in 1981 as a junior in college, and as an adult as well. Loewenstein has lived in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and traveled in the Palestinian Territories, where she worked for five months in 2002 at the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City. She has returned to Gaza several times since then. Jennifer Loewenstein is married to David Loewenstein, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.[6]

She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net

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by JOHN MEARSHEIMER

In response to a recent upsurge in tit for tat strikes between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel decided to ratchet up the violence even further by assassinating Hamas’s military chief, Ahmad Jabari. Hamas, which had been playing a minor role in these exchanges and even appears to have been interested in working out a long-term ceasefire, predictably responded by launching hundreds of rockets into Israel, a few even landing near Tel Aviv. Not surprisingly, the Israelis have threatened a wider conflict, to include a possible invasion of Gaza to topple Hamas and eliminate the rocket threat.

There is some chance that Operation ‘Pillar of Defence’, as the Israelis are calling their current campaign, might become a full-scale war. But even if it does, it will not put an end to Israel’s troubles in Gaza. After all, Israel launched a devastating war against Hamas in the winter of 2008-9 – Operation Cast Lead – and Hamas is still in power and still firing rockets at Israel. In the summer of 2006 Israel went to war against Hizbullah in order to eliminate its missiles and weaken its political position in Lebanon. That offensive failed as well: Hizbullah has far more missiles today than it had in 2006 and its influence in Lebanon is arguably greater than it was in 2006. Pillar of Defence is likely to share a similar fate.

Israel can use force against Hamas in three distinct ways. First, it can try to cripple the organisation by assassinating its leaders, as it did when it killed Jabari two days ago. Decapitation will not work, however, because there is no shortage of subordinates to replace the dead leaders, and sometimes the new ones are more capable and dangerous than their predecessors. The Israelis found this out in Lebanon in 1992 when they assassinated Hizbullah’s leader, Abbas Musawi, only to find that his replacement, Hassan Nasrallah, was an even more formidable adversary.

Second, the Israelis can invade Gaza and take it over. The IDF could do this fairly easily, topple Hamas and put an end to the rocket fire from Gaza. But they would then have to occupy Gaza for years to come, since if they left Hamas would come back to power, the rocket attacks would resume, and Israel would be back where it started.

An occupation of Gaza would trigger bitter and bloody resistance, as the Israelis learned in southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000. After 18 years of occupation they conceded defeat and withdrew all their forces. This experience is the reason the IDF did not try to invade and conquer southern Lebanon in 2006 or Gaza in 2008-9. Nothing has changed since then to make a full-scale invasion of Gaza a viable alternative today. Occupying Gaza would also place another 1.5 million Palestinians under formal Israel control, thereby worsening the so-called ‘demographic threat’. Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005 to reduce the number of Palestinians living under the Israeli flag; going back now would be a huge strategic reversal.

The final, preferred option is aerial bombardment with aircraft, artillery, missiles, mortars and rockets. The problem, however, is that the strategy does not work as advertised. Israel used it against Hizbullah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008-9, but both groups are still in power and armed to the teeth with rockets and missiles. It is hard to believe that any serious defence analyst in Israel thinks another campaign of sustained bombardment against Gaza will topple Hamas and end the rocket fire permanently.

So what is going on here? At the most basic level, Israel’s actions in Gaza are inextricably bound up with its efforts to create a Greater Israel that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the endless palaver about a two-state solution, the Palestinians are not going to get their own state, not least because the Netanyahu government is firmly opposed to it. The prime minister and his political allies are deeply committed to making the Occupied Territories a permanent part of Israel. To pull this off, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will be forced to live in impoverished enclaves similar to the Bantustans in white-ruled South Africa. Israeli Jews understand this quite well: a recent survey found that 58 per cent of them believe Israel already practises apartheid against the Palestinians.

Creating a Greater Israel will produce even bigger problems, however. In addition to doing enormous damage to Israel’s reputation around the world, the quest for a Greater Israel will not break the will of the Palestinians. They remain adamantly opposed not only to the Occupation, but also to the idea of living in an apartheid state. They will continue to resist Israel’s efforts to deny them self-determination. What is happening in Gaza is one dimension of that resistance. Another is Mahmoud Abbas’s plan to ask the UN General Assembly on 29 November to recognise Palestine as a non-member state. This move worries Israel’s leaders, because it could eventually allow the Palestinians to file charges against Israel before the International Criminal Court. Thus, the dream of a Greater Israel forces Tel Aviv to find ways to keep the Palestinians at bay.

Israel’s leaders have a two-prong strategy for dealing with their Palestinian problem. First, they rely on the United States to provide diplomatic cover, especially in the United Nations. The key to keeping Washington on board is the Israel lobby, which pressures American leaders to side with Israel against the Palestinians and do hardly anything to stop the colonisation of the Occupied Territories.

The second prong is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s concept of the ‘Iron Wall’: an approach that in essence calls for beating the Palestinians into submission. Jabotinsky understood that the Palestinians would resist the Zionists’ efforts to colonise their land and subjugate them in the process. Nonetheless, he maintained that the Zionists, and eventually Israel, could punish the Palestinians so severely that they would recognise that further resistance was futile.

Israel has employed this strategy since its founding in 1948, and both Cast Lead and Pillar of Defence are examples of it at work. In other words, Israel’s aim in bombing Gaza is not to topple Hamas or eliminate its rockets, both of which are unrealisable goals. Instead, the ongoing attacks in Gaza are part of a long-term strategy to coerce the Palestinians into giving up their pursuit of self-determination and submitting to Israeli rule in an apartheid state.

Israel’s commitment to the Iron Wall is reflected in the fact that its leaders have said many times since Cast Lead ended in January 2009 that the IDF would eventually have to return to Gaza and inflict another beating on the Palestinians. The Israelis were under no illusion that the 2008-9 conflict had defanged Hamas. The only question for them was when the next punishment campaign would start.

The timing of the present operation is easy to explain. For starters, President Obama has just won a second term despite Netanyahu’s transparent attempt to help Mitt Romney win the election. The prime minister’s mistake is likely to have hurt his personal relations with the president and might even threaten America’s ‘special relationship’ with Israel. A war in Gaza, however, is a good antidote for that problem, because Obama, who faces daunting economic and political challenges in the months ahead, has little choice but to back Israel to the hilt and blame the Palestinians.

The Israeli prime minter faces an election of his own in January and as Mitchell Plitnick writes, ‘Netanyahu’s gambit of forming a joint ticket with the fascist Yisrael Beiteinu party has not yielded anything close to the polling results he had hoped for.’ A war over Gaza not only allows Netanyahu to show how tough he is when Israel’s security is at stake, but it is also likely to have a ‘rally round the flag’ effect, improving his chances of being re-elected.

Nevertheless, Pillar of Defence will not achieve its ultimate goal of getting the Palestinians to abandon their pursuit of self-determination and accept living under the heel of the Israelis. That is simply not achievable; the Palestinians are never going to accept being consigned to a handful of enclaves in an apartheid state. Regrettably, that means Pillar of Defence is unlikely to be the last time Israel bombards Gaza.

Over the long term, however, the bombing campaigns may come to an end, because it is not clear that Israel will be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state. As well as resistance from the Palestinians, Israel has to face the problem that world opinion is unlikely to back an apartheid state. Ehud Olmert said in November 2007, when he was prime minister, that if ‘the two-state solution collapses’ Israel will ‘face a South-African-style struggle’, and ‘as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.’ One would think Israel’s leaders would appreciate where they are headed and allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own. But there is no sign that is happening; instead, Israel foolishly continues to rely on military campaigns like Pillar of Defence to break the Palestinians.

John J. Mearsheimer is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the co-author of The Israel Lobby.

This essay originally appeared in the London Review of Books.

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Who Started It?

The obscenity of this attack reminds us of nothing so much as the Nazis’ cowardly and murderous attack on the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto…Is that obvious and unavoidable parallel already forgotten among modern Israelis?—Eds

By Patrick Higgins
For days now, Israel has been launching aerial attacks on Gaza, resulting in many dead and many injured. The attacks are part of a larger and massively depressing spectacle of a usurping colony forcing a population into a wall-enclosed ghetto and bombing them in the name of Judaism and the Jews.

A New York Times article, published November 14th, reports on the death of Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari, killed by one of Israel’s recent (“pinpoint,”* according to the article) airstrikes. Naturally, the article makes sly non-mention of the others—including the children—killed in the strikes. One phrase in the article reflects the Israeli government’s logic regarding the matter: “The ferocity of the airstrikes, in response to what Israel called repeated rocket attacks by Gaza-based Palestinian militants…”

The article goes on to bolster this logic when considering the always-tenuous ceasefire between Hamas, the governing body of Gaza, and Israel:

“Since [2008-2009] Hamas has mostly adhered to an informal, if shaky, cease-fire and at times tried to enforce the smaller militant groups to stick to it. But in recent months, under pressure from some of the Gaza population for not avenging deadly Israeli airstrikes, it has claimed responsibility for participating in the firing of rockets.”

So the question posed is, Who started it? When one reads the above words, one gets the sense that the “starting” of “it” amounts to a recent phenomenon, and that the question’s answer is to be found in recent events, circa last weekend. This logic upheld by the Israeli government and the U.S.’s “newspaper of record” is also upheld by—I apologize in advance for the astonishing lack of surprise here—the U.S. government.

At the end of his presidency, George W. Bush** justified Operation Cast Lead—Israel’s massacre of around 1,400 Palestinians—by saying Hamas started it by breaking a ceasefire with rocket fire.

First of all, that was never even true. Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4th, 2008, when it raided the Gaza Strip and killed six Hamas members. The raid was reported by the Guardian at the time. The event wasn’t really mentioned in the mainstream discussion of the U.S., which reveals something about the predominant U.S. attitude towards Israel and Gaza.

Supporters of Israel often brag about how Israel “withdrew” from Gaza, as if Gaza’s transition from formally occupied territory to open-air prison constituted a grand Israeli peace effort. But Israel breaches Gazan territory at will and becomes quite pestered when it’s met with resistance for doing so. This is perhaps unexceptional. Israel’s sponsor, the United States, similarly believes it owns everything and can do what it likes to whatever territories at any time. Just think of its vast drone network, always busy murdering civilians in places from Pakistan to Yemen.

Technically, Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Gaza offered Israel a truce as recently as November 12th. But let’s ask the question in a deeper sense: Who started it?

The question is easily answered, but it should be asked with more specificity: Who started the murderous settler-colonialism? (“Murderous settler-colonialism” is redundant, but I will nonetheless employ the phrase to make the point as clear as possible.)

Israel did, of course. The question of settler-colonialism is important. It clarifies. After all, settler-colonialism is a process. In Palestine, it’s always underway. More important to note is that it’s always violent.

Built into the settler-colonialist project is a plan to separate the people of the subject population from each other, severing individuals from their communities. In order for this to occur, the subject population’s present must become its past and that past must then be erased. This happens both through appropriation and through sheer destruction.

Sheer destruction is another art Israel has learned exceptionally well from its sponsor, the United States. One task undertaken by settler-colonialists in the U.S. was the mass extermination of North American bison (which, unbeknownst to far too many, still goes on today), dramatically changing the land that Native Americans knew so intimately. Similarly, Israel has for years been undertaking the mass extermination of olive trees, dramatically changing the land that Palestinians knew so intimately.

Indeed, the U.S. and Israel share values. Moreover, they share tactics. Their special relationship is drenched in a common genre of imagery: the imagery of death, as evidenced by the countless corpses of buffalo and olive trees, to say nothing of the countless corpses of people.

The blockade of Gaza is one form the violence of Israel’s settler-colonialism has taken. It’s not commonly regarded as violence in the U.S. After all, supporters of the U.S.’s sanctions on Iran so often consider them alternatives to violence.

Actually, sanctions are horrifyingly violent. The 500, 000 Iraqi children murdered by Bill Clinton’s sanctions in the 1990s are testament to the fact that those seeking to “cripple” economies are seeking to starve children.

The reality is the same in Gaza. One report by the United Nations has declared that it will become “unlivable” by 2020 if present conditions continue. Under these conditions, perpetual and vicious, rockets—made with the few materials to which access is possible—are resistance symbols, declarations of struggle, promises that Israel’s violence will not be accepted by Gaza, despite the military power of the forces arranged against it.

In summation, those who observe the violence in Palestine and feel compelled to scream to Palestinians about the necessity of recognizing Israel’s right to exist either cannot or will not recognize murderous settler-colonialism.

How about that question: Does Israel have a right to exist?

It is not typically good form to answer a question with a question, but because this particular question is a trick, I feel comfortable doing so. So: Can “Israel” be separated from the murderous settler-colonialism in which it has been engaged since its foundation?

Let’s suppose the answer is no. By that I mean that the Palestinian right of return continues to be denied and Israel’s racist system built on paranoia over demographics continues its violence. In that case, the answer to the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is as easy as the answer to the question of whether murderous settler-colonialism has a right to exist.

That is answer is no.

Nope.

Not a chance.

*Read “Gaza truce broken as Israeli raid kills six Hamas gunmen,” published in the Guardian and written by Rory McCarthy, in which an Israeli official is quoted bragging about a “pinpoint” operation. Fares Akram and Isabel Kershner casually use exactly that word to describe Israel’s actions in the recent article “Israelis Launch Major Assault on Gaza, Killing Hamas Leader” in the New York Times.

**Bush was obviously awful, but what about Obama? Well, pro-Obama efforts only harm Gaza. He is the head of an imperial state. It’s his job not to give a shit about Palestinians.

Patrick Higgins is a writer living in Detroit. He can be E-mailed at higginspat@hotmail.com and followed on Twitter @DonnyDiggins.

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Targeting Civilians: Israel’s Specialty
By Stephen Lendman

Bullies choose easy adversaries to pummel. Equal fights are shunned. It’s the same in schoolyards or battlefields. America and Israel operate this way. They avoid foes able to give as much as they take. Rogue governments never say they’re sorry.  During Cast Lead in January 2009, Professor Jeremy Salt wrote “A Message to the brave Israeli Airmen.” His comments apply to what’s now ongoing.

What’s it like firing missiles at people you can’t see, he asked? Does it help being unable to see who you’re killing? Is your conscience eased by inflicting disproportionate force on people unable to fight back and civilian infrastructure? Are you comfortable about slaughtering civilian men, women, children, and infants? Does this weigh on your conscience, or are you at ease? Do you sleep well or have nightmares about men, women and children you killed at home, in beds, kitchens, living rooms, schools, mosques, at work, or at play?

Do farmers in their fields, mothers with children, teachers in classrooms, imams in mosques, children at play, the elderly, frail or disabled threaten your security? Do you ever question what you’ve done and why? Have you no shame, no sense of decency, no idea of the difference between right and wrong? Do you know the law? If so, why do you violate it? Doing so makes you complicit in crimes of war and against humanity? Do you know that?  Do you blindly follow orders or have a mind of your own? Have you murdered civilians before? Will you do it again if ordered? Will you keep following orders blindly or do the right thing?

“Brave” Israeli airmen, soldiers, sailors, and other security force personnel are cowards. They’ve acted lawlessly for decades.

Palestinian suffering is a way of life. Imagine living every day not sure if you’ll live or die. Imagine young children growing up this way. Do Israeli children know what Palestinian ones endure? Are they told? Do they care? Do their parents? Israel’s moving thousands of troops and heavy weapons to Gaza’s border. Mossad-connected DEBKAfile said:

“Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and the high IDF command are pushing for the ground operation, Stage B of the Pillar of Cloud operation, to start without delay. The prime minister and defense minister prefer to wait.”

Another potential holocaust looms. Civilians always suffer most. Israel and America willfully target them. It part of the imperial strategy of both countries. Human lives don’t matter, just conquest, dominance, and exploitation. Cast Lead took a terrible toll. Missiles, bombs, shells, and illegal weapons were used against defenseless people. Mass slaughter and destruction followed.

Horrific crimes of war and against humanity were committed. Responsible officials remain unaccountable. Security Council no-fly zone protection wasn’t ordered. Over 1,400 Gazans perished. More than 80% were civilians. Over 300 were children. Around 5,300 were injured. Over 1,600 were children or infants. Israel willfully targeted them. Neighborhoods, schools, universities, mosques, hospitals, UN facilities, fishing boats, civilian factories and workshops, municipal buildings, charitable foundations, civilian infrastructure, and other noncombatant sites were bombed and shelled.

Farmland was bulldozed. Power facilities and irrigations systems were destroyed. International leaders were indifferent about human slaughter and suffering. Only three low-level Israeli soldiers received punishments too minor to matter. The al-Samouni family lost 27 members. Salah Talala al-Samouni saw his mother blown apart. Rocket and shell fire killed his two-year old daughter, father, aunt, cousin, and entire family. Media scoundrels said nothing. They support Israel’s worst crimes.

Under siege, Gazans haven’t recovered from Cast Lead. Now they face the prospect of more war perhaps worse than 2008-09. International leaders share culpability through silence, indifference, and/or complicity. Washington is involved in all Israeli wars. Weapons, munitions and funding are supplied. Political support is given. Obama told Netanyahu, go ahead and bomb and shell at will. Call it “self-defense” and pretend no one knows it’s not. On November 15, the Senate unanimously passed a non-binding supportive resolution. Not a single profile in courage expressed opposition.

AIPAC thanked Obama and Senate members for supporting Israel. Gazan civilians and resistance fighters are maliciously called terrorists. They’re heroes, not criminals. On November 14, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) national director Abe Foxman expressed support for Israeli bombing and shelling, saying:

“Israel has shown tremendous restraint in the face of the unceasing rocket and mortar fire launched from Gaza.  This operation is directly targeting the leadership responsible for these attacks, as well as the warehouses and facilities housing their weapons.”

“No country in the world would stand by and tolerate such attacks on more than a million civilians.”

“The international community has a clear obligation to condemn these attacks and to support the actions taken by Israel against Hamas and other terror organizations operating in Gaza as Israel carries out its basic duty to defend its civilian population.”

For almost a century, ADL fronted for Jewish supremacy. It backs occupation harshness. It’s mindless about Palestinian suffering. It conducts smear campaigns against critics. Its entire history is loathsome. Israeli crimes are called self-defense. It plays the same blame the victim game as Israel, Washington, AIPAC, and other Zionist organizations. Only Jewish rights matter. Palestinians are criminalized for defending themselves. Israel agreed to halt military operations during Egyptian Prime Minister Hersham Kandil’s visit. He and Egyptian cabinet ministers arrived in Gaza Thursday. He’ll return Friday. Israeli attacks continued. At Al Shifa Hospital, Kandil visited victims. He denounced Israeli attacks, saying: “This tragedy cannot pass in silence, and the world should take responsibility for stopping this aggression.” Cairo will try to mediate a truce, he added.

Since Saturday, over 40 Palestinians were killed. Hundreds more were injured. Many are in serious condition. Dozens of air strikes continue. Death and injury numbers may rise exponentially. Current figures underestimate the toll because some victims lie beneath rubble. The International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) said Israel conducted 30 sorties in less than 30 minutes on Friday. At 10PM Thursday, the IDF said it struck 70 targets in the previous hour.

Civilian sites and government buildings were bombed and shelled. Two UN schools were struck. Heavy damage was reported. The Ahrar Center for Detainees’ Studies said a church under construction was targeted. IMEMC said, “Children, infants, women and elderly are among the casualties, including children whose bodies were severely mutilated and burnt due to Israeli shells. A pregnant woman and her unborn fetus are among the killed.”

Gazan resistance fighters said they won’t honor truce conditions as long as Israel keeps killing Palestinian men, women, children, infants, and the elderly. On Thursday evening, a Beit Hanoun home was bombed. Three children died. One was nine years old.  A 10-month old infant was killed when another home was struck. Through early Friday morning, at least eight children, a pregnant woman, and two elderly men died. Thirty thousand IDF reservists were called up. Military leaves were cancelled. Tanks, armored vehicles, and troops are mobilizing on Gaza’s border. Invasion looks ominously likely. On November 16, Mathaba said the Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) “received numerous complaints on the atrocities and possible war crimes committed against the Palestinian people.”

On November 20 and 21, two days of open hearings will be held. Commission members include former Magistrate Musa Ismail, former Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Dean Zulaiha Ismail, Center for Global Research Director Michel Chossudovsky, and two former Iraq UN humanitarian coordinators – Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday. On November 16, Alternative News.org headlined “No safe haven: Civilians under attack in the Gaza Strip.” An eyewitness visited Al Shifa Hospital. Many injured Gazans are in serious condition.

Forty-year old Salem Waqef suffered brain injury. He’s in a coma on a ventilator. It’s unclear if he’ll survive. Ten-month old Haneen Tafesh was admitted unconscious. She suffered a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage. She’s also in a coma on a ventilator. Doctors said her condition deteriorated since admitted. Hours later she died. Ahmed Durghmush suffered brain trauma. Shrapnel penetrated his skull. Brain matter protruded from his head wound. His condition also deteriorated after surgery.

Throughout Thursday, emergency room staff were handling numerous arrivals. Injuries range from easily treatable to severe to life threatening. Justice Ministry public information director, Khalid Hamad, was at home when shelling targeted a neighbor’s house. Israel “targeted civilians deliberately,” he said. “The Israeli forces don’t make mistakes.”

Thirteen-year old Duaa Hejazi was brought in “bleeding a lot.” She sustained upper body shrapnel wounds. Pieces are still embedded in her chest. She sent a message to other Gazan children, saying:

“I say, we are children. There is nothing that is our fault to have to face this. They are occupying us and I will say, as Abu Omar said. If you’re a mountain, the wind won’t shake you. We’re not afraid. We’ll stay strong.”

Al Shifa director general Dr. Mithad Abbas explained the dire conditions under which hospital staff must cope, saying:

“When those cases arrive at our hospital, it is not under normal circumstances. They come on top of the siege, the blockade, which has resulted in a lack of vital medicines and required medical supplies.” Al Shifa lacks essential medicines, some equipment and supplies. They include antibiotics, IV fluid, anesthesia, gloves, catheters, external fixators, Heparin, sutures, detergents and spare parts for medical equipment. Power outages exceed 12 hours daily. Small amounts of fuel maintain operations at those times. Dr. Abbas said his supply will be exhausted in days if current conditions continue.

He doesn’t know where the next missile or shell will strike. Perhaps Al Shifa will be targeted. Israel considers all civilian sites fair game.

On November 15, the Global BDS Movement issued the following statement in part:

“Stop a New Israeli Massacre in Gaza: Boycott Israel Now!”

Despite biased Western media reports, Israel “initiated and escalated this new assault on the eve of its upcoming parliamentary elections, underlining the time-honored Israeli formula of Palestinian bodies for ballots. Israel will continue its belligerence, aggression and state terrorism unless it is made to pay a heavy price for its crimes against the Palestinian, Lebanese and other Arab peoples. It is high time for BDS against Israel.  This is the clearest path to freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians and the entire region.”

At issue also is a pending November 29 vote on Palestinian UN non-member observer status. Israel and Washington have gone all out to subvert it. Member States have all the more reason to support Palestine. In less than two weeks we’ll know. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah urged Arab leaders to use all means to halt Israeli attacks on Gaza. “No one is telling Arab countries today, ‘Please go open your borders and begin the operation to liberate Palestine.’ What we want is to end the attack on Gaza.” This is everyone’s battle…We’re not asking you for a solution. We’re asking for effort.”

“Some say the Arabs don’t have the courage to stop oil production. Decrease your oil exports or raise the price a little and you will shake the United States. You will shake Europe. Brothers, if you can’t cut off oil, decrease your production or raise the price. Put on some pressure. No one is calling for armies or tanks or planes.”

Nasrallah called Israel’s Gaza attack “criminal aggression.” Multiple crimes of war and against humanity are committed. Much is at stake in Palestine, the region and beyond. Washington’s aggressive wars continue. New ones are planned. Israel’s a key partner. Both countries have imperial agendas. War features prominently in achieving them.

Michel Chossudovsky calls attacking and invading Gaza “part of the broader US-NATO-Israel military agenda.” Based on what’s happened post-9/11, expect the worst ahead.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War” http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

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Mark Cousins voices some of his concerns over the new Ben Affleck action thriller, Argo

Mark Cousins,  Bella Caledonia, a Scottish independentist journal

In the early 1990s, I started seeing films from Iran.  They startled me with their new ways of storytelling, unexpected intimacies and reach.  When I was director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, long before DVD and before many Iranian films were available on VHS, I wrote to an Iranian film agency, asking if they could send me copies of films.  A shoebox of treasures arrived.

In 2001, I drove to India, from Edinburgh, in my campervan.  I stayed for three weeks in Iran, mostly in villages and in the hills, but in the big cities as well.  Though it is often in our news media, I found myself in a terra incognita. Where were the crowds punching the air? Where was the anti-Americanism, the aggression, the feral Iran that I’d seen for years on TV?  The Iran I encountered was off-the-scale hospitable and beautiful; taxi drivers refused to take money, villagers insisted on making me dinner, etc.  This was just days after 9/11.   Several years later (during the somewhat liberal Khatami regime, not the reactionary Ahmadinejad one) I went back to Iran, and I went back again, for much longer, to make a series for Channel 4 on the history and poetics of Iranian film.

On these trips I made friends in Iran, smoked the sheesha, walked the streets, spent hours in Tehran’s traffic, went to the Jewish cafes, saw how ardent and brave many of the young people were, saw how most didn’t identify with their current government, how Iran is not its government or Mullahs, saw how restless and urgent for reform the country is.  Mostly, though, I felt the welcome of the people.  Once, when we parked our campervan in the wrong place, a policeman asked us to move it but gave us a melon to apologise for doing so.

Two days ago I saw Ben Affleck’s Hollywood film Argo, about the US’s rescue of six of its citizens during the Iranian revolution in 1979. The film gripped me and moved me and I hated it for this. Affleck is talented, liberal and a nice guy – I met him recently.  And yet he has made a film which chronically under-imagines, or mis-imagines Iran.  I looked into its whirring thriller machine to try to glimpse even moments of truth about Iran, its people, subjectivities, lives and street scenes, but saw none.  For decades, foreigners, particularly Americans, have portrayed the country as a chaotic place of jeopardy and inhospitality. Instead of updating or even tweaking this portrait, Affleck and his team have repeated it.  Since their storyline is about a rescue against the clock, Iran is, also, in their film, a prison from which white people use their ingenuity and courage to leave. The film it most brought to mind for me was The Great Escape.  The most emotional moment in Argo is when, on the flight out of Iran, the air staff announce that since the plane has left Iranian air-space, passengers can now have an alcoholic drink.  So even the air has a kind of toxicity.

After I saw it, I did a series of tweets about the stereotyping of Iran in the film.  Some people agreed with my comments but many tweeted back to tell me that the film is a thriller, about hostages and, so, it had to tell its story as a thriller, from the victims’ point of view and, since the Iranians were a threat, Argo had to be presented as such.  To say this was (a) to misunderstand my point about a history of stereotyped representation and (b) to accept entirely Hollywood’s thought process in deciding to return, again, to a moment in history where Iran was the aggressor.  So many people told me that the film is “evenhanded”, in other words it criticises the CIA and mentions the American and UK overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953.  Yes it does the latter (but doesn’t, for example, mention that the Revolution was originally Marxist and that it was hijacked by Islamists) but my objection was not related to this narrow good-bad paradigm of who did what in 1979.  I was objecting to a more general narrowness of visual discourse about Iran, a narrowness which, by dehumanising, makes possible a political discourse in which bombing the country can be talked about, and sanctions are seen as only hurting the government rather than the population of 75m people.

Affleck and his scriptwriters did indeed try to be even handed about the US’s involvement in Iran, about the iniquities of the Shah’s regime, etc (and had Iranian director Rafi Pitts as an advisor) but they use filmic techniques and assumptions which belie their aims.  In many of the scenes set in America, for example, the camera is on a tripod or tracking, whereas in Iran, it’s more often hand held, wobbly, fearful.  Yes I know they’re trying to show instability and urgency, but set this in a history of representation and your eyes roll.  And their Iran is, of course, underscored with thriller music – drones and adrenalin percussion. This is formulaic filmmaking and formulaic thinking about a country.  I’d go further and say that because Affleck and his team didn’t intend to stereotype, their national insults, which demean and offend, are almost like parapraxes.  Just as the film 300 portrayed Iranians as exotic and effeminate (and, even, at one point, as creatures with flippers!), so Argo seems partially fashioned out of equally unconscious material: an American fear of Iran.  This is a parapraxis because it seems to leak out from the film the way a Freudian slip does.  To get the full sense of how Hollywood imagines Iran we should ask why this story, this bit of history? Why now? Why in the thriller mode? And if you want to make a thriller, why not do so about Mossadegh, for example?

I think the issue is psychological distance.  In the internet age, it’s not the number of miles between people which separates them and makes them distant from each other (Skype, Twitter, Facebook and the like dissolve those miles), it’s the mental distance, the empathy and knowledge gaps.  I don’t know if Ben Affleck has been to Iran but, judging by his film, I suspect not.  Argo presents a country which is, psychologically, a galaxy far, far away.  That’s its problem, that’s why it’s damaging.

All countries (including this one, Scotland) have their psychological distances, of course.  And I have, too. But if Ben Affleck would like to see what a great film about the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, with a film within a film, might look like, he should look at Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s brilliant, entertaining A Moment of Innocence.

It should be on the Argo Blu Ray and DVD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Cousins is an Irish director and occasional presenter/critic on film.[1] He is a native of Ulster. He interviewed famous filmmakers such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski in the TV series Scene by Scene. In 2009, Cousins and actress/director Tilda Swinton created a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck and hauled it manually through the Scottish Highlands. The result was a traveling independent film festival which was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere. The festival was repeated again in 2011.[2][3][4]
His 2011 series The Story of Film: An Odyssey[5][6] is a 15 hour (15 episode)[7] history of film, shown on More4,[5] and later, featured at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.[8]

(c) Mark Cousins, 2012

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