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Keith Ellison (L) and Brian Baird in Gaza

Two American members of Congress, Brian Baird (D-WA) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) visited the Gaza Strip last week, in the first such visit since the Hamas coup in 2005. A joint press release issued last Thursday included the following:

“The stories about the children affected me the most,” said Ellison. “No parent, or anyone who cares for kids, can remain unmoved by what Brian and I saw here.”

“The amount of physical destruction and the depth of human suffering here is staggering” said Baird, “Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed, schools completely leveled, fundamental needs such as water, sewer, and electricity facilities have been hit and immobilized. Relief agencies, themselves, have been heavily damaged. The personal stories of children being killed in their homes or schools; of entire families wiped out, and relief workers prevented from evacuating the wounded are heart wrenching. What went on here? And what is continuing to go on, is shocking and troubling beyond words.” the Washington state Congressman said…

The Congressmen’s concerns about treatment of Palestinians were not limited to Gaza. They also visited Palestinian hospitals that treat patients from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. There they met with doctors, nurses and hospital directors who described how official Israeli policies restrict border checkpoints which make it exceedingly difficult and expensive for patients, nurses, medical technicians, and other essential personnel to reach the hospital to receive or provide care.

Now read the above again, pretending that you are an attorney cross-examining a witness. How much of the above testimony represents what the congressmen actually saw with their eyes and how much what they were told by their Palestinian (that is, Hamas) guides? How much is actual evidence and how much is hearsay provided by interested parties?

Really the only part of their statement that might be the fruit of actual observation is the statement that “the amount of physical destruction…is staggering”. Is it true? Tim Butcher of the UK Telegraph, no partisan of Israel, wrote:

One thing was clear. Gaza City 2009 is not Stalingrad 1944. There had been no carpet bombing of large areas, no firebombing of complete suburbs. Targets had been selected and then hit, often several times, but almost always with precision munitions. Buildings nearby had been damaged and there had been some clear mistakes, like the firebombing of the UN aid headquarters. But, in most [of] the cases, I saw the primary target had borne the brunt…

But, for the most part, I was struck by how cosmetically unchanged Gaza appeared to be. It has been a tatty, poorly-maintained mess for decades and the presence of fresh bombsites on streets already lined with broken kerbstones and jerry-built buildings did not make any great difference.

So in other words, yes of course the place is damaged — after all, a war was fought there — but the characterization of massive, wanton, gratuitous damage, particularly to civilian structures is unwarranted.

Here’s more from the congressmen:

Ellison, who is the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, recalled how they had walked on a road where a number of the homes had been flattened by the IDF.

“We came upon a temporary shelter, it was just cinder blocks that were set up in an eight by 10 square, and they had some kind of a tarp and a sheet over it to stop the rain. They were making tea and we walked up and said, ‘Salaam aleikum,” Ellison said. The people in the shelter welcomed them and made them tea.

“We asked them how are you coping with all of this, and they talked to us,” he said. “They told us their stories. I will admit and I was a little reluctant to say that I was an American congressmen. Quite frankly, it might have been the IDF launching the bombs, but they all said made in America.”

Still, “no treated us with anything but the greatest respect and kindness,” Ellison said.

All this happened entirely by chance, of course.

Baird said he was particularly troubled by the “apparent targeting” of hospitals, schools and relief centers. It would be a “remarkable coincidence if the rounds accidentally fell” on those institutions, he said.

And of course, it wasn’t a coincidence, as the IDF documentation of weapons hidden in schools, etc. amply demonstrated.

As a licensed neuropsychologist and the father of twin four-year-old boys, he was particularly struck by the remains of what had been a play area for children in a treatment center at Al-Quds Hospital, which had Disney characters painted on the walls. “It is very disconcerting to say the least,” he said.

Similarly, he said, it was upsetting to see that an American school had also been bombed, “of all the iconic things you could destroy,” he said. The bombing had not only killed people, but also “an institution that taught core American values like tolerance,” Baird said.

With all due respect, I do not believe that “core American values” are taught anywhere in Hamas-run Gaza. Here is an example of what Hamas children are taught.

At the school, he found a little book on baseball with a question the teacher had asked about legendary first baseman Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in the major leagues. “They are trying to teach Israel about tolerance using baseball, for goodness sakes, and that is now destroyed,” Baird said. — Jerusalem Post

American values, baseball and Disney, all bombed by cruel Israel. No wonder they were upset!

Baird and Ellison, it seems, were given a tour by Hamas officials and then dutifully reported their point of view. They did make the obligatory statement that rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza had to stop, but they certainly didn’t appear to think that the rocket attacks had anything to do with the Israeli operation:

“The first and most urgent priority must be to help the people in Gaza. At the same time, the rocket attacks against Israeli cities must stop immediately. Just as the people of Gaza should not be subject to what they have experienced, the Israeli civilians should not have to live in fear of constant and indiscriminate rocketing.”

One would think from the above that parallel natural catastrophes had occurred to Gaza and Israel, with Gaza’s being worse!

The congressmen also visited Sderot and Ashkelon, but although they ‘condemned’ the rocket attacks, the thrust of their recommendations was that the US needs to force Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians:

“If our colleagues had seen what we have seen, I think their understanding of the situation would be significantly impacted,” he said. “They would care about what happened to the Palestinians.”

Baird added that he hoped they, as well as members of the Obama administration, would come away with a sense that “the US has a responsibility to insist on a change in the situation in Gaza and the situation in the West Bank.”

The congressman said he would like to see more humanitarian aid and goods reaching the people of Gaza, accompanied by open border crossings that would allow Palestinians to travel for trade and medical care.

He also said he was troubled by the American origin of so much of the IDF weaponry used in Gaza, and suggested that the US should reconsider the military aid it provides and the weapons it sells to Israel.

“We need to use every pressure available to make these needed changes happen,” he said. — Jerusalem Post

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Brian Baird, Keith Ellison

In a 1955 story by the remarkable Steve Allen, “The Public Hating” (which you can hear here, starting about 10:45 into the file), a condemned political prisoner is executed by the sheer force of hatred. Alone in the center of a packed sports stadium, with the event televised throughout the nation, Professor Arthur Ketteridge is literally burned to death by the concentrated hatred of millions, all focused on despising this man.

Allen mentions the para-psychological experiments of Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University, well-known in the popular culture of the time, and suggests that the mechanism was some sort of psychokinesis.

But we all know that mass, hysterical hatred can burn its object spiritually if not physically.

I felt a little of it myself a few weeks ago when I was one of about 15 counter-protesters facing at least 300 anti-Israel demonstrators chanting, shrieking, roaring with hatred. While Fresno is much more civilized than London or San Francisco and there was no actual violence, it’s an experience that I won’t forget.

I felt it a few months back when I attended an academic conference of the Fresno State Middle East Studies Program, when Sasan Fayazmanesh displayed a slide of Neturei Karta members with Ahmadinejad and said “You see, he cannot be an anti-Semite. These are Jews. They are his friends” and the audience laughed.

Howard Jacobson has had the same feeling in the UK:

I was once in Melbourne when bush fires were raging 20 or 30 miles north of the city. Even from that distance you could smell the burning. Fine fragments of ash, like slivers of charcoal confetti, covered the pavements. The very air was charred. It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don’t mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.

A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.

It’s becoming a familiar taste.

Technorati Tags: Israel

Recently I wrote about the nonsense written about the Israeli election by the AP. There’s a great gnashing of teeth in the Western media about the prospect of a ‘hard-line’ right-wing government that will ‘stymie the peace process’, but the real reason that there will be no progress toward peace lies elsewhere.

All Israeli — but no Palestinian — leaders want to end the conflict

By Barry Rubin

What is the most important theme of Israeli politics, policy, and thinking today? It is pretty simple but you will rarely see it explained in much of the world:

Most Israelis believe that the Palestinians don’t want to make a comprehensive peace with Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state. Hamas doesn’t want it; the Palestinian Authority (PA) is both unwilling and unable to do it. Israel faces a hostile Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah, and various Islamist movements which all want to destroy it. In addition, it cannot depend on strong Western or international support in defending itself.

Therefore, it is not a moment for Israel to make big concessions or take big risks. Peace is not at hand. The priority — even while continuing negotiations and trying to help the PA to survive — is defense.

That’s what the people who voted for Labor or Likud or Lieberman, Kadima or Shas or National Union or Jewish Home or United Torah Judaism believed. More than 85 percent of Israelis voted for parties that hold that basic conception, while that concept itself is the product of a very serious assessment of very real experience.  And that — whatever differences they have — is beyond any definition of “left” or “right.”

In contrast, what is the main theme internationally in evaluating the elections? The right in Israel is against peace, Israelis moved to the right in this election hence Israelis are against peace.

To make such a leap, it is necessary to avoid talking about the herd of elephants in the room: Palestinian politics. If anyone looked beyond the most superficial level of English-language interviews by PA leaders trying to make propaganda points, the conclusion is unavoidable that there is no possibility of an Israel-Palestinian peace agreement for years to come. This is regardless of who is Israel’s leader or anything within reason, or even somewhat beyond reason, which could be offered.

Here are some tips toward proving that point:

• Analyze the Fatah Central Committee’s membership and the viewpoints expressed by the group’s top leaders. The number who can be called moderates ready to accept and implement a two-state solution stands at about 10 percent of them.

• Mahmoud Abbas is weak. He has neither charisma nor organized base. While relatively moderate he will not give up the demand for all Palestinian refugees to be able to live in Israel, something that is acceptable to no potential governing party in Israel. He is sick and will probably not last in office much longer. He has made no attempt to transform Palestinian political thinking or to provide an alternative vision of peace for his people.

• There is no moderate alternative Palestinian leader in Fatah or elsewhere. Are there those who voice a moderate two-state solution position and who advocate coexistence? Yes, there are some but they have no organization or power whatsoever. Moreover, they say so almost exclusively in English to Westerners and not to their own people. To express anything equivalent to Labor or Kadima, even Likud, positions is to risk your life.

• Schools, mosques, media and other institutions controlled fully or partly by the PA daily preach that all Israel is Palestine, Israel is evil, and violence against it is good. Hardly the most minimal steps have been taken to prepare the Palestinian masses for peace. For example, no one dare suggest that a Palestinian nationalist movement might want to resettle Palestinian refugees in Palestine, not Israel; or that Israel and President Bill Clinton made a good offer in 2000 and it was a mistake to reject it. Or a dozen other points necessary as a basis for real peace.

• Palestinian public opinion polls consistently show overwhelming support for hardline positions and for terrorism against Israeli civilians.

• An unyielding historical narrative still predominates that the whole land between the Jordan River and the sea is and should be Arab Palestine.

• Of course, Hamas governs about 40 percent of West Bank/Gaza Palestinians and opposes Israel’s existence explicitly. The PA and Fatah do not vigorously combat the Hamas world view, except perhaps for its idea of an Islamist state. On the contrary, Fatah and the PA put a higher priority on conciliation with Hamas rather than peace with Israel.

• This conflict is not continuing because there is a dispute about the precise boundary line between Israel and a Palestinian state. It is going on because the Palestinian leaders — all of them — are either unwilling or unable to accept Israel’s permanent existence, the end of the conflict, the abandonment of terrorism, and the settlement of Palestinian refugees in a Palestinian state.

• What should have been happening recently is that the PA sent delegations around the world to announce it was the sole legitimate government of the Gaza Strip, that Hamas seized power in a coup and murdered Fatah people in cold blood, that Hamas is an extremist terrorist group, and that the PA demands the international community restore its own rule to the area. Instead, it sent delegations around the world to blame Israel for every problem and tried to negotiate a deal with Hamas without requiring any change in that organization’s policy or goals.

None of the above arguments can be refuted. Literally none of these points — except for the barrier posed by Hamas’s rule over Gaza — is really understood by most governments, academics, or journalists.

Nevertheless, if you add all these factors together it’s clear that whoever governs Israel the PA is incapable of making comprehensive peace. There is no peace process but rather a long-term peace recess.

There’s nothing left or right wing about the above analysis. Tsipi Livni and Ehud Barak know these things. Equally, this analysis doesn’t mean Israel cannot work with the PA on such matters as stability, economic well-being for Palestinians, blocking terrorism, or keeping Hamas out of power on the West Bank.

There is a Palestinian partner for the above four issues, but not for a comprehensive solution ending the conflict forever in exchange for a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. As we learned in the 1990s with the peace process and more recently with disengagement, Israel’s actions — no matter how conciliatory and concessionary — cannot make peace when the other side is unwilling and unable to do so. It’s time for the rest of the world to learn this fact.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org, or write to Barry Rubin at profbarryrubin@yahoo.com.

From a Western point of view, especially a progressive Western point of view, Hamas is about the least attractive bunch of fanatics that you can find anyplace.

• They ignore the norms of civilized behavior, set up shop next to a legitimate state and try to kill its citizens at random.

• Their idea of dialogue with their political opponents is kneecapping, torture and murder.

• They are racist, antisemitic, sexist and homophobic; and their regime is totalitarian.

• They steal relief supplies sent to their own people and resell them., shooting Palestinian UN personnel in the bargain.

• They deliberately launch rockets and mortars from the midst of their population and hide arms and explosives in schools, mosques and hospitals.

It goes without saying that they lie and perform elaborate charades to create outrage in their fans around the world. For example, remember the story that the IDF shelled a school compound, killing 42, mostly civilians? Horrible, wasn’t it? But now that the dust is beginning to settle, we find that

The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of “false reporting” by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures.

As an example of such distortion, he cited the incident near a UN school in Jabalya on January 6, in which initial Palestinian reports falsely claimed IDF shells had hit the school and killed 40 or more people, many of them civilians.

In fact, he said, 12 Palestinians were killed in the incident – nine Hamas operatives and three noncombatants. Furthermore, as had since been acknowledged by the UN, the IDF was returning fire after coming under attack, and its shells did not hit the school compound. [Mortars were fired from the street in front of the school, and that is where IDF return fire was directed — ed.]

“From the beginning, Hamas claimed that 42 people were killed, but we could see from our surveillance that only a few stretchers were brought in to evacuate people,” said Levi, adding that the CLA contacted the PA Health Ministry and asked for the names of the dead. “We were told that Hamas was hiding the number of dead.” — Jerusalem Post

Fine, they lie. They do much worse things, so what?

So why is the world prepared to believe them? Why when they tell their lies with the flimsiest or no supporting evidence are they almost universally believed, when statements such as the quotation from Col. Levi above are dismissed as ‘Israeli propaganda’?

What is so appealing about anti-Israel expressions that they evoke a total suspension of critical judgment, so that anything, no matter how objectively improbable, is immediately believed by so many people?

What is so compelling that makes progressive people put their ideals of justice and democracy aside and support the vile Hamas in its struggle with Israel?

What is so motivating about hating Israel that it causes college students to drop the veil of political correctness that is so universal in academia today and fall into crude antisemitism (“Die, Jew“)?

I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because the sheer volume of misinformation, lies and hateful material that has already been absorbed has succeeded in becoming part of many people’s bedrock assumptions, the basic principles that are used to make drawing everyday conclusions practical.

If so, it will be difficult to reverse the phenomenon by simply pointing out, for example, that Mohammed al-Dura was not hit by Israeli bullets in 2001, that there was no massacre in Jenin in 2002, that a Red Cross ambulance was not hit by Israeli missiles in Lebanon in 2006, that Israeli tanks did not kill the driver of a UN relief convoy near the Erez crossing in 2008, and of course the truth about the Jabalya school incident.

Unfortunately anti-Israel attitudes are beginning to be more than annoyances. They affect policy of nations, including powerful ones like the US, toward Israel. A misperception of civilian damage in Operation Cast Lead may have caused US pressure on Israel to terminate the operation. This could also be said of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. The information war is at least as important as the military struggle, and we are not winning.

The only way to undo this is to use the same tools, to proactively flood the world’s perceptions with truth, and not only react to lies. Imagine if Israel operated several worldwide satellite channels providing news and entertainment in various languages. A Jewish-Israeli Aljazeera.

This would be enormously expensive and it would have to find a way to avoid the self-doubt, the penchant for hyper-critical  analysis and yes, even the irrational self-hatred that sometimes seems to characterize  Jews and Israelis. One would hope that Gideon Levy and Amira Hass of Ha’aretz would not appear on it.

Too hard? But Israel managed to make itself the preeminent military power in the Mideast because it was necessary for survival. Surely it would also be  possible to become an information superpower.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, information war

There’s been a lot of discussion about who will pay the bills (estimated to be in the millions of dollars) for the octuplets born to Nadya Suleman, who — as everyone knows — already has six children.

One solution to the problem that may be open to them will be to apply for Palestinian refugee status and let UNRWA foot the bill. Here’s the official definition:

Under UNRWA’s operational definition, Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. UNRWA’s services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. UNRWA’s definition of a refugee also covers the descendants through the male line of persons who became refugees in 1948. The number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than 4.6 million in 2008, and continues to rise due to natural population growth. — UNRWA

Nadya’s father, Ed Suleman, is reported to be “a Palestinian immigrant who hails from Jerusalem”. If it can be shown that he counts as a refugee, then so does Nadya.

However, UNRWA does not grant refugee  status to the children of Palestinian women married to non-Palestinians — although a Palestinian father conveys such status even if the mother is non-Palestinian (making it possible for there to be someone who is legitimately both Jewish and a Palestinian refugee). Feminist KPFA-listeners please take note.

I don’t know what the UNRWA policy is for children of unmarried Palestinian women when the father is unknown (Suleman’s sperm donor has not been identified).

But keeping in mind UNRWA’s generosity, which has allowed the original 550,000 -700,000 refugees to grow to 4.6 million,  and the generally-accepted need to keep families together, I’m sure something could be worked out. What’s another 15 when you already have 4.6 million?

Technorati Tags: Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Nadya Suleman, octuplets