Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Big_Bird]

I propose a thread for posting interesting articles you read that concern the conflict in Gaza.

There are other threads for debating the situation. Let's just leave this one for posting links to articles or clips you found of interest (not run of the mill Yahoo news clips - but perhaps an interesting perspective, or indepth analysis). You do not need to agree with the article you post. For example, you could post a couple with opposite perspectives, or footage, or an eyewitness account. It will be interesting to see what others find.


Robert Fisk: The self delusion that plagues both sides in this bloody conflict

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

I think the article is right. They way to go after terrorists is either to go after the countries that sponser them or get the governments of the counties where they are funded to crack down on their supporters

[Kuros]

About the Qassam Rockets

[moosehead]

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10069.shtml


Why would Israel bomb a university?
Dr. Akram Habeeb writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 29 December 2008

The Islamic University of Gaza, February 2007. (Wesam Saleh/MaanImages)

As a Fulbright scholar and professor of American literature at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), I have always preferred to keep silent about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I always felt that it was my mission to preach love and peaceful coexistence. However, Israel's massive offensive against the Gaza Strip has spurred me to speak out.

Last night, during the second night of Israel's unprecedented attack on Gaza, I was awakened by the deafening sound of intensive bombardment. When I learned that Israel had bombed my university with American-made F-16s, I realized that its "target bank" had gone bankrupt. Of course Israeli politicians and generals would claim that IUG is a Hamas stronghold and that it preaches terrorism.

As an independent professor, not affiliated with any political party, I can say that IUG is an academic institution which embraces a wide spectrum of political affinities. I see it as prestigious university which encourages liberalism and free thought. This personal point view might seem to be biased; therefore, I would invite anyone who would doubt about my assertions to browse IUG's website and research its history. They would learn about its membership in various international academic institutions, the active role its professors play in scholarly research as well as prizes and research grants they have received.

Why would Israel bomb a university? Israel did not only target my university last night. It also bombed mosques, pharmacies and homes. In Jabaliya refugee camp Israeli bombs killed four little girls, sisters from the Balousha family. In Rafah they killed three brothers, aged 6, 12 and 14. They also killed a mother, along with her one-year-old child from the Kishko family in Gaza City.

These acts made me reflect on some of the commandments given by God to the "Chosen People:" Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. No one could be chosen by God to annex the land of other people and kill them. Israel made these ethical choices by itself. Israel itself chose to wage its wars to eliminate the indigenous people of Palestine.

Dr. Akram Habeeb is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.

[Jandar]

Last update - 21:05 31/12/2008

WATCH: YouTube pulls some IDF videos showing Gaza assault

By Haaretz Service and The Associated Press


The Israel Defense Forces has opened a YouTube channel broadcasting footage taken over the last five days in its air offensive on the Gaza Strip.

The channel was launched as part of the army's PR campaign to draw international support for its military operation on Hamas' infrastructure in Gaza.
Advertisement
YouTube briefly yanked the clips on Tuesday, saying it was inappropriate, only to restore it a few hours later, labeling it inappropriate for minors, the military said.

"We were saddened on December 30, 2008 when YouTube took down some of our exclusive footage," the military wrote on its YouTube channel page. Fortunately, due to blogger and viewer support, YouTube has returned the footage they removed.

YouTube did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment. In the past, YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., has been pressed to take down videos depicting violence. The site has no automatic review process.

One of the aerial surveillance videos shows a group ofmilitants loading rockets onto a truck before being targeted by an Israeli missile.

"The blogosphere and the new media are basically a war zone in a battle for world opinion," said IDF spokeswoman Major Avital Leibovich said. She added that the YouTube channel is an important part of Israel's attempt to explain its actions abroad.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051593.html

http://kr.youtube.com/profile?user=idfnadesk&view=videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrv5tAPg_Ag

[arjuna]

If Hamas Did Not Exist

Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein01012009.html

Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel�s will is at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated �calls� for a �ceasefire� on �both sides�; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world�s bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.

The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do with �Terror�. It has nothing to do with the long-term �security� of the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some conjured-up �war� � a cynical and overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn�t want one of the Empire�s obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.

This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash�al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world�s population. The primary symbols today are Islamic � the mosques, the Qur�an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.

There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat�s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.

Strip away the clich�s and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world�s wealth. Worse yet you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the �wretched of the earth� begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?

The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. [...]

It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, [...]

Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo [...]

Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.

Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the �international community�? What will it take to see past the lies and indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel�s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d�etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel�s reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?

The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at [email protected]

[Jandar]

Israel pounds Hamas homes, flattens mosque
Army says troops are massed on Gaza border,
ready for any order to invade

AP updated 7:01 a.m. ET Jan. 2, 2009

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israel destroyed the homes of more than a dozen Hamas operatives and bombed one of its mosques on Friday, while the Israeli army said troops massed on the Gaza border were ready for any order to invade.

In what appeared to be a new Israeli tactic, the military called at least some of the houses ahead of time to warn inhabitants of an impending attack. In some cases, it also fired a sound bomb to warn away civilians before flattening the homes with powerful missiles, Palestinians and Israeli defense officials said.

Israel launched the aerial campaign last Saturday in a bid to halt weeks of intensifying Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza. The offensive has dealt a heavy blow to Hamas, but has failed to halt the rocket fire. New attacks Friday struck apartment buildings in a southern Israeli city. No serious injuries were reported.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

After destroying Hamas' security compounds, Israel has turned its attention to the group's leadership.

In airstrike after airstrike early Friday, Israeli warplanes hit some 20 houses believed to belong to Hamas militants and members of other armed groups, Palestinians said.

They said the Israelis either warned nearby residents by phone or fired a warning missile to reduce civilian casualties. Israeli planes also dropped leaflets east of Gaza giving a confidential phone number and e-mail address for people to report locations of rocket squads. Residents stepped over the leaflets.

Israel used similar tactics during its 2006 war in Lebanon.

Even as it pursued its bombing campaign, Israel kept the way open for intense efforts by leaders in the Middle East and Europe to arrange a cease-fire. Israel said it would consider a halt to fighting if international monitors were brought in to track compliance with any truce.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28404637

[Jandar]

Grad rocket fired from Gaza strikes Ashkelon home
By Haaertz Service
Last update - 17:26 02/01/2009

After a relatively quiet night in southern Israel, the onslaught of Palestinian rockets resumed Friday, with two salvoes of Grad rockets hitting Ashkelon. A home in the southern city sustained a direct hit, and one person, in an adjacent house, suffered shrapnel wounds.

Five people suffered shock in the targeted building.

The second salvo included two Grad rockets: one hit an open area, and the other struck a residential area, hitting a vehicle and sparking a fire. Three more people suffered shock.

The owner of the home that was directly hit, Hagai Ben Avraham, said that he had just gotten out of the shower and was preparing to go to synagogue when he heard the early warning siren and headed for the protected room in the house when the Grad hit.

"It's an obvious miracle," he said, after the rocket penetrated his shingled roof. "The entire family has called already. Neighbors invited us to spend Shabbat at their house. I'm not worried. It looks like I won't get a chance to pray tonight, but tomorrow I will say a blessing first thing in the morning."

Ben Avraham added that he had just finished renovating his house only three days earlier.

Three additional rockets hit the Eshkol Regional Council, with one rocket exploding in a resident's yard.

Early Friday morning, Gaza militants fired four rockets into Ashkelon. Three of them hit residential areas. One of the rockets scored a direct hit on an apartment building, but the lives of the residents were spared as they had spent the night in shelters. In another incident, a woman sustained minor shrapnel wounds and three others suffered shock.

Two more rockets hit the Sdot Hanegev Regional Council and two Qassams hit Sderot. No one was hurt, and no damage was reported.

The Israel Air Force fired missiles at Palestinian rocket launching squads in the Gaza Strip directly after a rocket salvo hit Ashkelon, and destroyed two rocket launchers.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052237.html

[Jandar]

Obama's Gaza silence condemned

Wednesday, December 31, 2008
07:36 Mecca time, 04:36 GMT al Jazeera

Despite growing pressure on Barack Obama to speak out on the crisis in Gaza, the US president-elect has remained silent on the issue.

Obama, holidaying in Hawaii, has made no public remarks on Israel's unrelenting military assault on the Palestinian territory, which has left more than 380 people there dead.

The former Illinois senator spoke out after last month's attacks in Mumbai and has made detailed statements on the US economic crisis.

But some fear that the US president-elect's reluctance to speak out on the Gaza raids could be sending its own message.

"Silence sounds like complicity," Mark Perry, the Washington Director of the Conflicts Forum group, told Al Jazeera.

"Obama has said that Israel has the right to defend itself from rocket attacks but my question to him is 'does he believe that Palestinians also have the right of self-defence?'"

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/12/2008123101532604810.html

[Big_Bird]

Jandar,

would you please restrain yourself and refrain from posting run-of-the-mill garden-variety newsflashes? This thread is for posting interesting articles or links, not every article you find on the conflict. Try an in depth analysis, or a new perspective you hadn't seen before, or footage, or the first hand account of an eyewitness, or a thought provoking editorial.

Everything you posted just looks like a Yahoo News bite.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a link to a blog of a Palestinian woman from Gaza. She is in touch with her family who are in the thick of the bombardments: http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/

One of her entries concerns a civillian ship equipped with volunteer doctors and medical supplies headed for Gaza. A couple of days ago it was rammed 3 times without warning by an Israeli ship. Mention of it can be found here: http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0417.html. I thought that was worth posting as I have seen mention of it all over the internet but not in mainstream media outlets. If someone has seen such an article, I'd be interested in a link.

Edit: I found a CNN clip by a British Journalist who was on the boat at the time and gives an eyewitness description.

Israeli Patrol Boat Rams Gaza Relief Vessel Cynthia McKinney & CNN Penhaul Reports

And

CNN is still capable of reporting the truth.

The Israelis are now claiming this attack (in international waters) was an accident. This is addressed by the journalist.

[Kimbop]

"This is the first university in the world that gives out bachelor�s degrees in rocket manufacture"

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/israel-targets-terror-labs-funded-by-us-islamic-group/2/

"The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday that Israeli Defense Forces aircraft bombed suspected Hamas terror laboratories located at the Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).

According to the article, IUG professors were using the labs to build explosives for the terrorist organization. A BBC report confirmed that the IUG science building was the target of the Israeli retaliatory strikes.

Thus far unreported is that the IUG science and technology lab was financed and constructed with the assistance of the Dublin, Ohio-based Arab Student Aid International (ASAI). In fact, the IUG website has a page dedicated to ASAI�s ongoing contributions to the Hamas institution and specifically mentions the labs financed by the Ohio Islamic group. "

[caniff]

"There is no "two-state solution" or "one-state solution" to the Arab Israeli conflict.

The latter solution is particularly popular on the left. Under that scenario, Israel is enfolded into a larger "secular democratic Arab state" with an Arab Muslim majority. It is in fact little more than a prescription for a Rwanda-style genocide of Jews. This is little doubt that a significant number of those proposing such a solution would really like to see this happen.

More important, there is no "two-state solution" to the Middle East conflict. Those speaking about a two-state solution really mean a 24-state solution, meaning the Arabs retain the 22 states they already have, adding a 23rd state of "Palestine" in parts of the West Bank and Gaza and pre-1967 Israeli territories, with Israel remaining the Jewish state - the 24th state in the plan - for the moment.

That such a solution will not end the conflict but only signal the commencement of its next stage has long been the quasi-official position of virtually all Palestinian groups, which have long insisted that any two-state solution is but a stage in a plan of stages, after which will come additional steps ultimately ending Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

The original partition plan of the United Nations had proposed that an Arab Palestinian state arise alongside Israel in 1948. The Arab world rejected this plan altogether. It had no interest in adding one more Arab Islamic state to its portfolio. It went to war to prevent the creation of any Jewish state.

The two-state solution is no more realistic an option today than it was in 1948. It is ultimately as much of an existential threat to Jewish survival in the Middle East as the one-state solution. Creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel would be a major step in the escalation of the Arab war against Israel's existence, even if that war is delayed for a time while the world celebrates the outbreak of peace in the Middle East thanks to the end of Israeli "occupation."

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=79F78A8F-42EA-4223-8ADA-CB52913AA4C3

[blade]

Gaza and the World: Will Things Ever Change?
January 03, 2009 By Ramzy Baroud


In times of crisis, most Arabs tune in to Aljazeera television. Sometimes it's comforting for the truth to be stated the way it is, with all of its gory and unsettling details, without blemishes and without censorship. When Israel carried out massive air strikes against Gaza on Saturday, December 27, terrorizing an already hostage and malnourished population, I too tuned in to Aljazeera.

Within seconds I learned of the tally: 290 deaths and climbing, with 700 more wounded, all in one day. But as dramatic as this event may have seemed - the highest Israeli inflicted death toll in one day in Palestine since Israel's establishment in 1948 - there was nothing new to learn. Tragedies anywhere - natural or manmade - tend to lead to social, cultural, economic and political upheavals, revolutions even, that somehow alter the social, cultural, economic and ultimately political landscapes in the affected regions, save in Palestine.

I gazed pointlessly at the screen. Learning of the aftermath of such tragedies seems more of a ritual than a purposeful habit. The Arab and international responses to the killings can only serve as a reminder of how ineffectual and irrelevant, if not complacent their timid mutterings are.

Once again the US blamed Palestinians, and the Hamas "thugs" using words that defy logic, such as "Israel has the right to defend itself." The statement remains as ludicrous as ever, for a country like Israel with an army that possesses the world's most lethal weapons, including nuclear arms, cannot possibly feel threatened by an imprisoned population whose only defense mechanism are fertilizer-based homemade rockets. While Israel has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians in Gaza (one thousand on Saturday alone) a handful of Israelis have reportedly died as a direct result of the Palestinian rockets in years. Do numbers matter at all?

European governments chose their words carefully, "expressing concern", "calling on Israel to use restraint" and so on. Arab governments were, as usual, distracted with trivialities, protocols and easily lost sight of the crisis at hand.

Then, the same, ever predictable outbursts began. Passionate callers from all over the world called various TV and radio stations in the Middle East and shouted, yelled, cried, vented, called on God, called on Arab leaders, called on all of those with "living conscience" to do something. In turn, audiences too cried at home as they listened to the heated commentary and watched footage of heaps of Palestinian bodies throughout the Gaza Strip.

The passion soon spilled to the streets of Arab capitals, of course under the ever-vigilant eyes of Arab police and secret services. Flags of US and Israel, and in some cases Egypt were sat ablaze along with effigies of Bush and Israeli leaders.

�Rising up to the occasion' some Arab governments declared, with much hype their intention to send an airplane or two of medicine and food to Gaza, a few boxes clad with the donor country's flag, flashed endlessly on local media. Meanwhile, news reports spoke of Palestinians attempting to flee the Gaza prison into the Sinai desert. They were met with decisive Egyptian security presence at the border.

Strangely enough, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas remained faithful to the script, despite Gaza's unprecedented tragedy. On Sunday, he blamed Hamas for the bloodbath. "We talked to them (Hamas) and we told them, 'please, we ask you, do not end the truce. Let the truce continue and not stop", so that we could have avoided what happened."

Was Mr. Abbas informed of the fact that Hamas hasn't carried out one suicide bombing since 2005? Or that the �truce' never compelled Israel to allow Palestinians in Gaza access to basic necessities and medicine? Or that it was Israel that attacked Gaza in November, killing several people, claiming that it obtained information of a secret Hamas plot?

Even stranger that while Abbas has chosen such a position, many Israelis are not convinced that the war on Gaza was at all related to the Hamas' rockets, and is in fact an election ploy for desperate politicians vying for Israel's dominating right wing vote in the upcoming February elections. In fact, the Israeli design against Gaza had little to do with the �escalation' of the rocket attacks of mid December.

"Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces "Cast Lead" operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip," wrote the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz on December 28, which also revealed that the plan had been in effect for six months.

"Like the US assault on Iraq and the Israeli response to the abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser at the outset of the Second Lebanon War, little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians," said Haaretz.

And why should Israel devote a moment to the question of harming civilians or violating international law or any such seemingly irrelevant notions - as far as Israel is concerned - as long as their "Palestinian partners", the Arab League, or the international community continue to teeter between silence, complacency, rhetoric and inaction?

By Thursday, January 1, the death toll climbed to 420, according to Palestinian medics and news reports, and over 2000 wounded. A doctor from a Khan Yunis clinic in Gaza told me on the phone, "scores of the wounded are clinically dead. Others are so badly disfigured; I felt that death is of greater mercy for them than living. We had no more room at the Qarara Clinic. Body parts cluttered the hallways. People screamed in endless agony and we had not enough medicine or pain killers. So we had to choose which ones to treat and which not to. In that moment I genuinely wished I was killed in the Israeli strikes myself, but I kept running trying to do something, anything."

Until Arab countries and nations translate their chants and condemnations into a practical and meaningful political action that can bring an end to the Israeli onslaughts against Palestinians, all that is likely to change are the numbers of dead and wounded. But still, one has to wonder if Israel kills a thousand more, ten thousand, or half of Gaza, will the US still blame Palestinians? Will Egypt open its Gaza border? Will Europe express the same "deep concern"? Will the Arabs issue the same redundant statements? Will things ever change? Ever?


Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London)http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20144

[blade]

The Self-Defense of Suicide

By OREN BEN-DOR

Echoing Lebanon 2006, the people of Gaza are being butchered by murderous pilots of a murderous state. Ground forces will soon butcher many more. This widely-expected repetition of Israel�s large scale violence is carried out after a long process that was triggered when Israel unilaterally cleared its settlements and ground presence from Gaza only to create what has been described as a remote-controlled human zoo. Israel has maintained total control over Gaza�s borders, its air and sea space, its economy, its electricity, food and medical supplies. The people of Gaza have been starved, humiliated and constantly intimidated. However, whether the withdrawal was well-intended or not engages little with the reasons rockets are being defiantly shot at the Israeli towns of Sderot, Ashkelon and Beer Sheva.

Beyond achieving very short term relief from rocket attacks the scale of Israel�s violence is question-begging and thought provoking. Israel�s actions, justified by the �no choice� (ein brera) and �self-defence� rhetoric, can temporarily put the lid on the volcano of hatred around Israel and within it but, after the initial shock and awe, it is surely destined to bring much more violence.

Assassinating individual members of Hamas, even toppling the organisation, destroying its infrastructure and buildings, will not destroy the legitimate opposition to the arrogant and self-righteous Zionist entity. No army, however well equipped and trained, can win a combat against increasing number of people who no longer have any reason to care about dying. If there was hatred against Israelis before the Gaza massacre, the hatred after it will be of a different order of magnitude.

Given the sure failure of attempts to bring about stability through violence, intimidation, starvation and humiliation, what, on earth, is the desire that moves the Israeli state? What, do Israelis imagine, will be achieved by this massacre? There must be something which is suppressed here. There must be, for Israelis, some being and thinking which is preserved, indeed defended, by the pathology of provoking a permanent state of violence against them. What kind of self-righteousness conditions this self-destructive desire to be hated?

Gaza itself gives us a clue. Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are descendants of 750000 refugees who were expelled in 1948 from what is now the Jewish state. Ashkelon is built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Majdal whose people were expelled in 1948, many to Gaza. Only by such massive ethnic cleansing could a state with a Jewish majority and character be established. Any just realisation of the refugees� internationally recognised right of return would effectively mean the end of the Zionist project. Those who choose to return would not merely threaten the Jewish majority. Upon return, they would surely press demands for equal citizenship. In so doing, they would challenge the foundational discriminatory premise of the Jewish state, which assigns a different stake in the state to all those who pass a test of Jewishness, whether they live in the country or elsewhere. Thus, for the same reason that Israel discriminates against its own non-Jewish Arab citizens, it will prevent the return of the refugees.

The proliferation and dominance of the self-defence discourse and its by-product - the uncritical acceptance of the legitimacy of the Israeli state - successfully hide the fact that Israel itself is an apartheid state which is based on an apartheid (separation) premise. In the name of this apartheid premise, occupation, dispossession and discrimination affected all Palestinians whether in Gaza, the West Bank, in Israel itself or indeed all over the world.

Thus, what is in fact being �preserved� is the unwillingness, or rather the inability, of Israelis to question their own state�s apartheid foundation. The concealing mantra about Hamas�s rocket firing versus Israel�s legitimate self-defence cynically conscripts both the Palestinians of Gaza and the Israelis of Sderot. Shielding the Jewish state�s unwillingness to deal with colonial and racist Zionism is more important than all of them.

Accepting the right of Israel to securely exist as a Jewish state has now become the bench mark for political moderation. Obama is already singing the song. Egalitarian anti-Zionists who challenge that right readily fail the test. This anti-Zionist voice is inclusive and moderate. It insists that injustices to Palestinians stem from the very premise of statehood that Israel is based on. Injustices to Palestinians encompass the whole of historic Palestine in a way which cannot be partitioned so that they become visible only in the territories, including Gaza, which Israel occupied in 1967. Let us, then, break the idle chatter about self-defence that merely levels �criticisms� against Israel but by that legitimises it: the origin of the violence in Gaza is intimately linked to the manner the Israeli state came into being and to the continuing toleration of the apartheid premise at its very essence. Israel should not be �reformed� or �condemned� but replaced with a single egalitarian structure over all historic Palestine.

Israel needs a continuing cycle of violence. As long as this cycle is provoked through daily oppression, Israelis can sustain that haven in which they can unite behind their inability to examine their apartheid mentality. Violence maintains a zone in which that existential threat of old stifles any possibility for genuine empathy and egalitarian self-reflection. At the same time, violence is a necessary means for entrenching the purported legitimacy of what is claimed to be the only alternative to this violence. That alternative is no other than the �surprisingly� failing, �sane�, �reasonable� and �moderate� �peace process� towards two states, a process which aims to legitimise the apartheid state once and for all. The discourse has been hijacked in such a way that the urgent calls for the immediate cessation of violence resuscitate that non-starter, the essentially unjust two states project that will ensure the continuation of violence.

Alas, the pathology of generating violence against oneself, violence that suspends reflection on the core apartheid, succeeds only at the price of generating enormous hatred. The Israeli pathology will bring about, stealthily and fatefully, that which the Israelis fear most.There is indeed �no choice� for the nationalistic project of the eternal victims but to commit suicide with those whom they oppress.

The sublimated Zionist desire to be hated is the fuel of Israel�s unity and self-righteousness. This self-destructive nature, concealed as a desire for self defence, comes from deep and ancient forces of which Zionism is merely a symptom and a hint. That which preserves these self-destructive forces ensures that the eternal victims� apartheid nationalisticproject will be a fleeting phenomenon. When arrested in mere nationalism, primordial victim mentality self preserves by generating collective suicide of that nationalistic project. The self-defence of suicide points out the uniqueness of the Israeli apartheid. Both the no-choice and the self-defence rhetoric contain a chilling chronicle of suicide foretold. Despite its military might, Israel is a weak and dying state that desires to destroy itself. The most powerful nations in the world assist this suicidal process and this fact calls for urgent contemplation.

Oren Ben-Dor grew up in Israel and teaches Legal and Political Philosophy at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK. His latest book, Thinking About Law: In Silence with Heidegger, was published in 2007 by Hart Publishing, Oxford. He can be reached at: [email protected]
http://www.counterpunch.com/dor01012009.html

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Not an article, but here's an interesting Dutch documentary on the influence of the AIPAC lobby on American foreign policy in the ME (looks to be a couple years old):

edit: the link doesn't work, but on google video there's a pretty good one (about an hour long) if you search 'AIPAC'.