Jan 07 2009

Real News: Historical Amnesia And Gaza

Phyllis Bennis, Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, talks with The Real News about the Gaza invasion by Israel.

Several days into Israel’s military operation in Gaza, The Real News speaks to Phyllis Bennis about the conflict. After giving a brief background on the events that led to the invasion of the Gaza Strip, Phyllis explains the various ways in which the United States facilitates Israel’s activities. According to Phyllis, it is the unquestioning military and political support from Washington that makes Israel’s actions possible.

Phyllis Bennis is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power.



Real News: January 6, 2009 – 8 min 4 sec

Historical Amnesia And Gaza

Phyllis Bennis: Where you decide to start the clock determines how you define the crisis



Map courtesy of and copyright by Stratfor

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    • Edger on January 7, 2009 at 04:24
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  2. According to Phyllis, it is the unquestioning military and political support from Washington that makes Israel’s actions possible.

    is a popular theory, but one I think is highly flawed.  There simply isn’t any evidence for it.  We have evidence that prior to the Johnson administration, the United States was deeply critical of Israeli policies – often even downright hostile.  Israel behaved how it wanted regardless, with a single exception – the threat by Eisenhower to attack Israeli forces if they went past the Suez canal in the Sinai war of ’56, and that response may be exceptional due to the fact that Israel was not acting alone in that instance, but jointly with France and Britain.

    The claim that Israel will do whatever the US tells it to since Johnson has only one piece of evidence for it, meanwhile: that the US succeeded in persuading Israel not to retaliate directly against Iraq when missiles were fired at Israel during the ’91 Gulf War.  Which, considering that multiple other nations were attacking Iraq at the time, wasn’t the toughest sell.

    I don’t say any of this to suggest that the United States shouldn’t stop supporting Israel doing whatever it wants to do.  But I do think that people believe, wrongly, that US changing its attitude towards Israeli actions is going to produce certain change.  

    • Edger on January 7, 2009 at 09:20
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    by Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)

    Dick Cheney says Israel didn’t seek “U.S. approval” to begin the ground attack into Gaza. Heh. They didn’t seek “U.S. approval” before they attacked Lebanon, either. They sought Dick Cheney’s approval, and he gave it to them. Dick Cheney isn’t the “U.S.” He’s just the vice president, and the president of the Senate. He’s not in the military chain of command at all, and according to him he doesn’t even work in the executive branch of government.

    No word yet on whether Israel got Dick’s permission to use cluster munitions on the sand colored people, this time or last time. Israel’s Haareetz says the Israeli Defense Force is aiming the cluster ammunition at “open areas.” I have trouble imagining Hamas placing suitable cluster bomb targets in the open. You might shell an open area to set off mines that could be buried there, but if you use cluster bombs to do that you’ll create another minefield on top of the one you’re trying to clear. Cluster bombs are made for killing people. Maybe the IDF is shelling open areas with cluster bombs as a humanitarian gesture, something to remind the Palestinians to stay in the closed areas where it’s safer, but I doubt it. Journalist Jamal Dajani of Link TV, posting from the Israel-Gaza border, judges Israel’s self described “surgical strikes” to be “as surgical as shooting chickens in a coop with a shot gun.”

    Mr. Bush blames the Gaza debacle on Hamas, saying it has “once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization” with attacks on Israel. Bush didn’t mention that Israel broke the ceasefire in November when it sent ground troops into Gaza. Cheney probably didn’t let anybody tell Bush that part. Maybe it’s a moot issue; Israel has had Gaza under a blockade since January 2008, six months before the ceasefire went into effect. Since a blockade is an act of war imposed by armed force, one has to marvel at how even the most adroit Rovewellian can say with a straight face that a ceasefire exists within a blockade.

    But then logic has never been a requirement of Bush administration rhetoric. Kondi says that, “Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of (Palestinian Authority) President Mahmoud Abbas.” The “illegal coup” she refers to was the January 2006 election in which Hamas won a large majority of Palestinian Parliament and ousted the corrupt, self-serving Fatah party. Fatah, you may recall, was the political organization of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who built a personal nest egg of $1 billion and $3 billion out of public funds.

    Kondi says that she won’t settle for a ceasefire that allows Hamas to keep its rockets to defend itself with. Hamas makes the Qassam rockets themselves, since they can’t afford to buy weapons from anybody. The rockets are simple steel filled tubes with no guidance system. The fuel is a mixture of sugar and fertilizer, and the warhead contains fertilizer and scavenged TNT. Qassam rockets are worthless against the F-16 fighter-bombers we gave the Israelis.

    FOX News put fear and loathing merchant John Bolton on the air to say the Israelis has a right to use those F-16s to “eliminate” Hamas. After that, Bolton said, Israel should use the F-16s to attack Iran for us.

    [snip]

    I once had the audacity to hope that my country would become that shining city on a hill, a champion of the oppressed and abandoned. Human societies don’t get much more oppressed or abandoned than the Palestinians, but political regimes don’t come any more malignant than the Bush administration.

    It would be nice to believe that change is just around the corner, but the ear-splitting silence from Barack Obama, on a holiday surfing safari as the Gaza debacle unfolded, has me suspecting that the Israelis now own U.S. foreign policy trigger, stock and barrel regardless of who the American public puts in power. I don’t buy Obama’s “one president at a time” excuse. Bush, Cheney and the neocons have gotten away with atrocity after atrocity after atrocity for eight merciless years because people who could have stopped them didn’t want to speak out of turn.

    • Edger on January 7, 2009 at 13:56
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    RawStory:

    Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor working in Gaza, told Sky News on Monday that that he believes Israel is deliberately attacking the Palestinian population, not just targeting Hamas as Israeli authorities have said numerous times.

    “Just a little bit more than an hour ago, the Israelis bombed the central food market in Gaza City and we had a mass influx of about 50 injured and between 10 and 15 killed,” said Gilbert, on the phone with Sky News.

    “At the same time they bombed an apartment house with children playing on the roof and we had a lot of children also. This is really like from Dante’s Inferno. It’s like hell here now and it’s been bombing all night. Up till now, close to 500 people have been killed and the number of casualties is getting to 2, 2 and a half thousand, which 50 percent are children and women.”

    …

    “You’ve talked about the civilians, the women and children, the men who aren’t involved in this but are you also getting casualties that are Hamas fighters?” asked the reporter.

    “To be honest, we came on New Year’s Eve in the morning,” answered Gilbert. “I’ve seen one military person among the tens — I mean, hundreds — we have seen and treated. So, anybody who tries to claim this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying.

    • Edger on January 7, 2009 at 15:16
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    REUTERS WIRE — BREAKING 824AM ET: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Wednesday Israel and the Palestinian Authority had accepted a truce plan for Gaza announced by Egypt on Tuesday.

    “The president is delighted by the acceptance by Israel and the Palestinian Authority of the Franco-Egyptian plan presented last night in Sharm el-Sheikh by (Egyptian) President (Hosni) Mubarak,” said a statement from Sarkozy’s office.

    “The head of state calls for this plan to be implemented as quickly as possible for the suffering of the population to stop.”

    Israel would not confirm they have accepted the proposal.

    …

    Earlier today, Israel ordered a pause in its Gaza offensive for three hours to allow food and fuel to reach besieged Palestinians, and the country’s leaders debated whether to accept an international cease-fire plan or expand the assault against Hamas.

    DEVELOPING…….

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