Israel's Gaza Assault: 'Crying and Shooting'

LONDON, Jan. 9, 2009 — -- The United Nations has finally voted for a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. Both Israel and Hamas have ignored the resolution and Gaza is still burning.

This follows a spate of speeches against Israel earlier in the week from nations as politically disparate as Venezuela, Iceland and Spain. "The Nuremberg Tribunal will be waiting for you in the future in order to judge you as war criminals," said Venezuela's Ambassador, Julio Escalona, on Jan. 7, addressing the Israelis.

But Great Britain, in lockstep with its ally the United States, has refused to criticize Israel's massive military assault on the Gaza Strip, instead condemning the militant Islamic organization Hamas for its primitive rocket attacks on southern Israel, and consistently referring to the Israeli attack as an "action" or "operation.

The British press, however, has cast a much colder eye on "Operation Cast Lead," as the Israelis call their attack on Gaza. A number of journalists and commentators are not pulling any punches. Some examples:

Professor Avi Shlaim, writing in The Guardian on Jan. 7, says that Israel "has become a rogue state, with an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders." A former officer in the Israeli army, Shlaim goes on to define his terms.

"A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practices terrorism – the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all these three criteria," he says.

Shlaim is now professor of International Relations at Britain's prestigious Oxford University. He says he served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960's and has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.

What he can't stand, he says, is what he calls the "Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line," and Israel's "policy of victimhood."

"The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness," he says. "In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of 'bokhim ve-yorim,' – crying and shooting."

Shlaim says that while Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression (from Hamas rockets), the imbalance of power between the two sides leaves little doubt as to who the real victim is.

"This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted," he says. "A small and defenseless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath."

Other writers on the op-ed pages of the mainstream press here have also complained about the lack of outrage over Gaza from the United States and Great Britain.

Mary Riddell, writing in the conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph on Jan. 8, says: "Bring back the politics of denunciation! Yes, Hamas is a vicious neighbor… [but] nothing excuses acts so sickening that, if perpetrated by a less blessed state, would be reviled across the globe as war crimes. Once again, the world has declined to tell Israel that it has no divine mandate for destruction."

Referring to diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire, Riddell says: "Israeli aggression follows a calculated pattern. Attack until global opinion becomes too restive, then do a deal. This allows a generous helping of killing time."

The Israeli attack Jan. 6 on a U.N.-operated school in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp, where Palestinian families had taken shelter from the bombing, was singled out by the Beirut-based reporter and author Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent on Jan. 7.

An estimated 40 people were killed in this attack, including many children. The Israelis claimed that Hamas fighters were inside the school, though the U.N. says Israel later admitted to them privately that this was not the case. The U.N. had even given the Israeli army the GPS coordinates of the school, to spare it from attack.

"What is amazing …" Fisk writes, "is that so many Western leaders ... bought the old lie: that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties."

"What happened is not only shameful, it was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would have called this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas."

He then predicts that world leaders will "huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas, not Israel, originally broke the cease-fire."

Fisk does not agree.

"Israel broke it," he writes. "First on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza, and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians." (Hamas declared that the cease-fire was over on December 18th).

The famous Jewish pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim, writing in The Guardian on Jan. 1, points out that 20 years ago, Hamas was actually cultivated and encouraged by Israel as a tactic to weaken the rival Fatah movement, led by Yasser Arafat.

"Israel's recent history leads me to believe that if Hamas is bombed out of existence, another group will most certainly take its place, a group that would be more radical, more violent, and more full of hatred towards Israel," he writes.

Barenboim was recently forced to cancel a scheduled concert, in Israel, by the mixed, Israeli-Palestinian orchestra that he co-founded with the late Palestinian-American writer Edward Said.

Barenboim also attacks Israel's policy of collective punishment. "Is the entire population of Gaza to be held responsible for the sins of a terrorist organization?" he asks.

"We, the Jewish people, should know and feel even more acutely than other populations that the murder of innocent civilians is inhumane and unacceptable."

There seems to be a consensus among these writers that, from the Israeli point of view, there will be no security for its citizens until Israel makes peace with its Palestinian neighbors, as opposed to bombing them. And that Israel's attack on Gaza now is driven by its own domestic politics and the general election in February.

"All the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness," writes Shlaim. "The Army's top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas, in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006."

He adds that Israel's "cynical leaders" knew they could also count on apathy and impotence from pro-Western Arab regimes, and on the "blind support" of President George W. Bush in the last weeks of his term in the White House.

The rocket attacks by Hamas and other acts of terrorism have not happened in a vacuum.

During and after the 1948 war, Palestinians fled areas in present-day Israel such as Ashkelon as refugees to Gaza, in what the Palestinians call the "naqba" – the catastrophe – when hundreds of thousands of indigenous Arab people in Palestine were dispossessed during the creation of the Jewish state.

"Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians," writes Shlaim, in a rare statement by an Israeli. In Gaza, it has been compounded by an almost total economic blockade and Israeli control of all land, sea and air corridors that has turned the Strip into an open prison.

Barenboim says that every military victory has actually left Israel in a weaker position because of the emergence of radical groups. "Palestinian violence torments Israelis and does not serve the Palestinian cause: Israeli retaliation is inhuman, immoral, and does not guarantee security," he says, ending his article with this bleak observation.

"The destinies of the two peoples are inextricably linked, obliging them to live side by side. They have to decide if they want to make of this a blessing or a curse."

For the moment, it seems, both sides prefer to go on crying, and shooting.