Look at Syria, and you can see all the elements that have led to world wars

It’s hard to believe the west’s leaders are letting this escalate. Have we learned nothing from history?

Simon Jenkins


Thu 12 Apr 2018 19.09 BST


‘Theresa May says the chemical attack cannot go unchallenged, but that is a politician’s love of intransitive verbs.’ Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

What on earth are we doing? I have not heard a single expert on Syria explain how dropping missiles on that country will advance the cause of peace or lead its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to back down. It will merely destroy buildings and probably kill people. It is pure populism, reflected in the hot-and-cold rhetoric of Trump’s increasingly whimsical tweets. Heaven forbid that British policy should now, as it appears, be hanging on their every word.

We can accept that the chemical attack on a Damascus suburb was probably by war-hardened Syrian airmen, though rebellions do kill their own to win sympathy. But Britain too has killed civilians in this theatre. No, we don’t poison our own people, but we somehow claim the right to blow other country’s civilians to bits. Theresa May says that the chemical attack “cannot go unchallenged”, but that is a politician’s love of intransitive verbs. Who is to be the agency and under what authority? The time to punish the Syrian leadership is when the war is over. Outside intervention will make no difference to the conflict, except to postpone its end. That is doubly cruel.

This crisis is already displaying the familiar preliminaries to a reckless conflict. Hysterical language cavorts with the machinery of militarism.It seeks reasons for violence, not for its avoidance. Thus there was no reason for Britain to go to war with Iraq in 2003, beyond a sabre-rattling competition between Tony Blair and America’s George Bush. Nor back in history was there a reason for Germany and France to fight in 1870. There was no reason for war in 1914, beyond the murder of an archduke in Serbia. As AJP Taylor said of 1914: “Nowhere was there a conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated [and] became prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.” I wonder what Taylor would have said of Trump’s “Get ready Russia” tweet.

Most wars nowadays follow a triggering of often casual alliances and obligations, and from the absence of any potent forum – or even “hotline” between leaders – through which disagreements and minor disputes might be resolved. Peace in Europe was roughly sustained for 50 years through the councils of the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Then it collapsed as if from exhaustion. The dread prospect now is that the post-1945 cold war settlement, roughly overseen by the United Nations, has outlived its usefulness.

 White House struggles to explain Trump's Russia missile tweet – video

All the more reason for the world to beware of proxy wars. Britain has no dog in the Syrian fight, which is a miserable resurgence of one of the oldest and bitterest Middle East clan feuds. Assad was able to call on Iran and Russia to come to his aid, and they have done so with grim effectiveness. The rebels on the other hand were encouraged to hold out by the moral support of the west, and by material support from the anti-Iranian Saudis. Syria has paid a terrible price. Further intervention now would be lunatic.

May seems trapped by Washington, as Blair was in 2003. It is clear that her advisers do not think bombing Syria is the best way to respond to a chemical weapons attack, but she seems reluctant to admit it. She claims not to need the approval of parliament in firing missiles. That convention dates from when monarchs and their generals needed discretion to ward off imminent threats to national security. There is no threat now. This is not a military but a foreign policy decision. Going to war has serious implications. It clearly merits collective approval, especially from a minority government.

In 2003, Blair sought the approval of parliament to invade Iraq, albeit on a lie. Shamefully he received it. In 2013, Cameron sought approval to fight Syria, and was mercifully denied it. May can avoid a Commons vote, but with a mere 22% of the public reportedly in favour of bombing Syria and 43% against, even the gain to her machismo might be at risk. The danger is what happens next. An eye for an eye suggests a more spectacular and photogenic repeat of Trump’s missile bombardment of last year. But the risk of killing Russian or Iranian troops is clearly high, and of provoking military retaliation higher still. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is said to be in a paranoid state, as tanked up on machismo as Trump and May. These are moments when leaders take on the raiment of commanders, and give themselves licence to decide policy alone. It makes the job of their colleagues in restraining them all the harder. In-house hawks have all the best tunes.

This shows how weak are the underpinnings of international peace when the balance of power is upset. Nothing in the current state of the world merits a superpower confrontation, only the narcissistic and belligerent personalities of certain world leaders. Victors in war have an obligation to show patience and restraint towards the defeated. Russia in 1989 was defeated, but the west has been gloating ever since. Russia in Syria is guilty. That is not the point. In this first crisis in east-west relations since the cold war, it seems we must now rely on Russia, not the US, to show patience and restraint. That is an ominous prospect.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/12/syria-elements-world-wars-west-leaders-escalate-history

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My Comments : 

1. Jenkins is right in his conclusion, that the looming confrontation between "the West" and "The East" (Russia plus it's allies), seems to contain all the ingredients for the ignition of a semi- till full-blown world war.

2. His explanation however of the motives of the respective political leaders behind the development of this highly dangerous situation, are miles from the truth.

3. Although one has to assume, that Jenkins will know very well, that this situation has not merely arrived from the apparent labile character of the USA president, he systematically refuses to imply the driving force behind this state of affairs : The western colonial project called "Israel", both steered from within the colony and from a variety of places around the world, to start with the USA

4. Since the powers of the Zionist Internationale (also know as the Zionist Diaspora) have - from the moment the project officially started at 1896 in Vienna - are embedded into the political core of most of the western power houses, it has been declared a taboo to ever mention the existence of this constellation.

5. As I mentioned many times before, it has been the super-PAC financiers the Jew-supremacists Mercer and Adelson, who (paradoxically) parachuted White-supremacist Trump into the White House, because he has been their closest guarantee of the rapid fulfilment of the realisation of the "Eretz-Israe project plus the realisation of the hegemony of "Eretz-Israel" in the ME region.

6. Trump has not only received the electoral backing from the evangelicals (most of them are staunch christian zionists, who believe, that "the chosen people" need to return to "zion" in order to fulfil the prophecy that "the son of Jaweh will descend from heaven, in order to redeem humanity"), but with Trump came also his jew-supremacist son in law into the WH.

7. Although the Mercer clan had been able to dictate the list of - mostly jew-supremacist - personnel that Trump had to appoint into his administration and his WH staff, they did not succeed to install their most favourite proxies in the first all at once.

8. So the better half of 2017 had to be occupied by purging out all the people that did not fully approve of the USA geo-political agenda that the Jew-supremacist clan had in mind.

9. With the recent appointment of the extreme-right neo-conservative, christian zionist and notorious war-hawk Bolton the renovation of the WH staff and the replacement of Tillerson by Pompeo, meant to achieve unanimous approval for the long awaited attack on Shiite Iran - via an attack on the Lebanon and Syria and possibly a provoked third Intifada - has been completed.

10. Macron, who has close ties and ditto shared ME geo-political visions with the extreme-right Jew-supremacist leader Netanyahu has been a grateful pawn, that might give the long time zionist objective of the completion of the seven nations in five years at least the appearance of legitimacy.

11. May is not in a position to refuse the USA - that is supposed to be a leading trade partner, once the Brexit might be completed - any request of assistance either.

12. Furthermore one has to assume, that the entire NATO machinery might be employed once the spearheading USA-UK and France forces will have started the first stage of the confrontation, by forcing any excuse of initiating the article five of the NATO treaty.

13. Provoking article Five - one for all / all for one - will be the climax of a process of slowly but certainly preparing systematically for the final re-positioning of the western colony of "Israel".

14 Conform the historical tradition of absolute mercilessness / ruthlessness and uncompromisingly one-dimensional determination of reaching out for the zionist goal of the ultimate foundation of Eretz-Israel - one must not be surprised as World Peace will indeed be sacrificed on the altar of Zionism, be it the Jewish or the Christian branch (and most probably : both). 

15. Not just the foundation of Eretz-Israel, but as well the (finishing off of the) forced transfer of the indigenous Palestinians to Jordan (or preferably to southern Egypt, because Eretz-Israel will not be complete without both the West- bank AND the East bank of the river Jordan and eventually even having Eretz-Israel bordering the bank of the river Nile further South).

16. World Peace has to be sacrificed for both the world domination of the neo-conservatives from the USA - do consult the publications around the imperial PNAC objective - and for the regional domination of "Eretz-Israel" - do consult for instance the Yinon-plan, in combination with the Clean Brake strategy of (revisionist) Jacobinsky adept, Netanyahu - even if this would mean, that the looming confrontation between "the West" and "the East" at some point in the near future might bring in the nuclear power from the Far East (from the western-centrist perspective that is), called China....  

N.B. a. It has been former NATO secretary De Hoop Scheffer of all "authorities", who recently did warn against the Western doctrine of closing in geo-politically on Russia -  this in direct violation of the treaties the west had agreed upon with the then Gorbachev regime of not extending NATO influence beyond the borders of the post-Cold War zone - for this doctrine of cornering the former USSR will most certainly lead up to retaliation from the contemporaneous Russia leaders.

b. Cornering Russia, that also took place by the West and it's ME proxies, along the lines of exercising false flag attacks - notably the many "nerve gas attacks" (supposedly) by the Russian ally Assad (who, contrary to his opponents) in all cases did not have any coherent logical motive at all, to use these weapons) and the nerve gas attack on the Skripals, that apparently have been conveniently attributed by the West, to Russia - that all had been carefully staged by parties (like "Israel") that have a special interest in the region and the de-legitimisation of Russia. 

Disclaimer  : I do detest the abhorrent, authoritarian White supremacist and mafia-style operating Oligarchy leaning Putin as much as I do detest the abhorrent, authoritarian White supremacist and mafia-style operating Oligarchy leaning Trump. 

      

  

As Theresa May gears up for war in Syria, we should remember what hypocrites we are about chemical warfare in the Middle East

Not a soul today is mentioning the terrible war fought between 1980 and 1988, which was fought with our total acquiescence. It's almost an 'exclusive' to mention the conflict at all, so religiously have we forgotten it

• Robert Fisk 

April 12 2018

Oh, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses.

I’m not talking about America’s tweet-from-the-hip president and his desire to escape from the cops’ raid on his lawyer’s office – there’s a Russian connection, all right.

And I’m not talking about his latest sleaze. Life with Melania might not be great at the moment. More distracting to sit with the generals and ex-generals and talk tough about Russia and Syria.

I’m not talking about Theresa May, who wants to step out of the Brexit ditch with any distractions of her own: Salisbury attacks, Douma – even Trump. So Trump telephoned Macron, when the poor lady thought she’d won his hand. What is this nonsense?

Macron has now hitched his own wagon to the Saudis against Iranian “expansionism” – and no doubt arms sales to the Kingdom have something to do with it. But how sad that the desire of young French presidents to act like Napoleon (I can think of a few others) means that they devote themselves to joining in a war, rather than pleading against it.

Now we have our spokespersons and ministers raging about the need to prevent the “normalisation” of chemical warfare, to prevent it becoming a part of ordinary warfare, a return to the terrible days of the First World War.

This does not mean any excuses for the Syrian government – though I suspect, having seen Russia’s Syrian involvement with my own eyes, that Putin might have been getting impatient about ending the war and wanted to eradicate those in the last tunnels of Douma rather than wait through more weeks of fighting. Remember the cruelty of Grozny.

But we all know the problems of proof when it comes to chemicals and gas. Like depleted uranium – which we used to use in our munitions – it doesn’t, like a shell fragment or a bomb casing, leave a tell-tale hunk of metal with an address on it. When all this started with the first gas attack in Damascus, the Russians identified it as gas munitions manufactured in the Soviet Union – but sent to Libya, not to Syria.

But it’s a different war that I’m remembering today. It’s the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. When the Iranians re-crossed their own border and stormed into Iraq years later, Saddam used gas on thousands of Iranian soldiers – and civilians, for there were nurses and doctors at the war front.

Funny how we forget this now. We don’t talk about it. We have forgotten all about it. Talk about the “normalisation” of chemical warfare – this was it!

But in our desire to concentrate minds on Syria, we’re not mentioning the Iran gassings – Iran being another one of our present-day enemies, of course – and this may be because of our lack of official memory.

More likely it’s because of what happened: the institutionalisation of chemical warfare, the use of chemicals by Saddam who was then an ally of the West and of all the Gulf Sunni states, our frontline Sunni hero. The thousands of Iranian soldiers who were to die were referred to on Iraqi radio after they crossed the frontier. The “Persian insects” had crossed the border, it announced. And that’s how they were treated.

For the precursors for the Iraqi gas came largely from the United States – one from New Jersey –  and US military personnel later visited the battlefront without making any comments about the chemicals which were sold to the Iraqi regime, of course, for “agricultural” purposes. That’s how to deal with insects, is it not?

Yet not a soul today is mentioning this terrible war, which was fought with our total acquiescence. It’s almost an “exclusive” to mention the conflict at all, so religiously have we forgotten it. That was the real “normalisation”, and we allowed it to happen. Religious indeed, for it was the first great battle of the Sunni-Shia war of our time. But it was real.

Of the thousands of Iranians who were asphyxiated, a few survivors were even sent to British hospitals for treatment. I travelled with others on a military train through the desert to Tehran, the railway compartments packed with unsmiling young men who coughed mucus and blood into white bandages as they read miniature Korans.

They had blisters on their skin and, horrifically, more blisters on top of the first blisters. I wrote a series of articles about this obscenity for The Times, which I then worked for. The Foreign Office later told my editors that my articles were “not helpful”.

No such discretion today. No fear of being out to get Saddam then – because in those days, of course, the good guys were using the chemicals. Don’t we remember the Kurds of Halabja who were gassed by Saddam, with gas which the CIA told its officers to claim was used by the Iranians?

For this war crime, Saddam should have been tried. He was indeed a “gas-killing animal”. But he was hanged for a smaller massacre with conventional weapons – because, I have always suspected, we didn’t want him exposing his gas warfare partners in an open court.

So there we are. May holds a “war cabinet”, for heaven’s sakes, as if our losses were mounting on the Somme in 1916, or Dorniers were flying out of occupied France to blitz London in 1940.

What is this childish prime minister doing? Older, wiser Conservatives will have spotted the juvenile quality of this nonsense, and want a debate in Parliament. How could May follow an American president who the world knows is crackers, insane, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages – about missiles that are “nice and new and ‘smart’” – are even taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the US? We should perhaps be even more worried about what happens if he does turn away from the Iran nuclear deal.

This is a very bad moment in Middle East history – and, as usual, it is the Palestinians who will suffer, their own tragedy utterly forgotten amid this madness. So we are going to “war”, are we? And how do we get out of this war once we have started it? Any plans, anyone? What if there’s a gigantic screw-up, which wars do tend to usually produce? What happens then?

Well, I guess Russia comes to the rescue, just as it did for Obama when gas was used for the first time in the Syrian war.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-syria-war-uk-chemical-weapons-attack-iran-iraq-thatcher-russia-a8300881.html

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My Comments :

Comments, that I recently (d.d. 18-03-2018) published under an Independent article on the so-called Russian nerve agent attack in Salisbury, where I also did refer to the blistering hypocrisy of the West regarding the employment of  WMD's, both against it's own civilians as well as against Iran by the then heralded western ally and proxy-warrior, Saddam Hussein.

Me blond and blunderful Boris, me know notting mister Putin, me simply from the UK Porton Down, where we - the last hundred years or so - never ever tested our own nerve gasses on some 25.000 innocent people, including hundreds of Indians whom we did not expose to nerve gasses being unleashed in special gas-chambers.

How dare you mr. Putin of accusing us - or a notoriously ethno-nationalist and notoriously false flag planting ally of us from the ME maybe - of using these highly destructive nerve agents against innocent people, such as the totally innocent double spy Skripal and his totally innocent daughter, in order to try to put the blame on you.

Put the blame on you, so we can impose even more crippling economic sanctions on you and thereby finally make you an even weaker and therefor a decisively less successful military opponent in the ME.

The ME where you had the nerve to deeply and effectively frustrate our neo-colonial aspirations a hundred years after we wholeheartedly adopted the then Ottoman / Turkish part of the ME in our save Imperial luggage and thus providing the world with some ammunition to keep on fighting there for all the generations since and yet to come. 

Well Mr. Putin, after we will have finally succeeded in making you weaker, we can finally follow our most innocent ally the USA - that also never ever tested poisoned nerve agents on their innocent people, let alone the USA might even have used poison-related gas agents against the Vietnamese people - to expand our totally innocent Holy Wars in the Middle East.

To expand our totally innocent Holy Wars in the Middle East, to start off of course with brand new interventions in the Lebanon and Syria again some time later this year, only to end up at destroying your eternal ally Iran in the process.

Iran that after all, never ever suffered the horrible consequences of deadly nerve agents, that we freely handed out to our then blessed ally Saddam Hussein, so he could use it on our behalf against the Iranians.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/may/06/science.research

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/01/india.military

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_and_the_United_Kingdom

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation-delirium

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/25/usa.matthewengel

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/opinion/halabja-america-didnt-seem-to-mind-poison-gas.html

So mister Putin, me blond and blunderful Boris, me from the totally innocent West - from the UK Porton Down to be precisely - me know notting about the use of any nerve agent (or whatever military use of WMD's for that matter) by ourselves or by our closest ally the USA against whoever, in our Great and totally innocent Imperial History...

The demise of the Israeli Labor Party as any kind of progressive force

JVL Introduction

Latest news is that Israel’s Labor Party leader has suspended ties with Jeremy Corbyn for ‘enabling antisemitism’. We were reminded of an article that appeared in Israel’s radical newspaper +972 last year, focusing on the politics of this leader, Avi Gabbay: his capitulation on secular education, an absolute rejection of ever partnering with Arab Israeli parties, a threat to expel his party’s only Arab MK, his commitment to the settlements, his claim that that his party had chosen liberal values at the expense of Jewish values…

It’s hard to see why any socialist would want to maintain links with such an ethno-nationalist oriented party. Time, surely, for it to be held to account in the Socialist International of which it is a member.

Head of the Zionist Union party Avi Gabbay with Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog during a faction meeting at the Israeli parliament on November 20, 2017. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

Explained: Why many on the Left are furious at new Labor leader Avi Gabbay

Joshua Leifer, +972

16 November 2017

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From vowing never to join forces with Arab political parties to saying there’s no reason to remove settlements, Labor’s new leader has alienated many on the Left in recent months. His latest move, supporting the deportation of asylum seekers, is different.

Last July, Avi Gabbay was elected chairman of the Labor party on the promise to return the party to power. Since then, Gabbay has staked out positions considerably to the right of Labor’s traditional base, leaving many on the Left frustrated, even devastated. Labor gained ground in the 2015 elections because it cast itself as the anti-Netanyahu; now, Labor voters worry, Gabbay is turning into Netanyahu.

Gabbay was always an unconventional choice for Labor. A former head of the Israeli telecom giant Bezeq, Gabbay was among the founding members of Moshe Kakhlon’s center-right Kulanu party, and even served as minister in the current government, resigning in May of 2016 to protest the appointment of Avigdor Liberman as defense minister. While Gabbay’s rivals in Labor raised questions about his right-wing past, the party ultimately decided to give him a chance.

Religion and state? Okay

The first sign of trouble came shortly after Gabbay’s election, in August, when he appeared at an event about religion and state alongside Education Minister Naftali Bennett in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Bennett, at the time, was facing criticism from secular Israelis who were angered by his changes to the Israeli public school curriculum, which they felt amounted to religious indoctrination. While Gabbay did criticize Bennett’s changes to the curriculum, he made a concerted effort to appeal to the religious right. “I have no problem if my son learns Talmud,” Gabbay said.

‘We have nothing in common with them’

In early October, at a speaking event in Beer Sheva, Gabbay announced that he would refuse to form a governing coalition that included the Joint List, the political heterogeneous union of Arab parties and the third largest party in the Knesset. “We have nothing in common with them,” he said. Gabbay’s stance on the Arab parties was in practice not significantly different from that of his predecessor, Isaac Herzog, but the absolute rejection of partnering with Arab parties ruffled feathers even within his own party.

Threatening to kick out Labor’s only Arab MK

Two weeks later, when Labor MK Zuheir Bahlul announced he would not attend the Knesset’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Gabby reportedly threatened that Bahlul “won’t sit in the next Knesset session,” adding that he was tired of “this kind of extremism.” Gabbay’s public threats against his party’s only Arab MK disturbed many in Labor and on the left. “From his response to Bahlul,” the Haaretz editorial board wrote, “[Gabbay] has proven himself to be a nationalist like all the others—someone who does not want Arabs in the governing coalition, or in his party.”

Settlements are here to stay

Gabbay further frustrated members of his own party when he declared that no settlements would need to be evacuated in a future peace agreement. Tzipi Livni was quick to release a statement that Gabbay’s views did represent hers or those of the Zionist Union, the merger of the Labor party and Livni’s Hatnua. Despite the controversy, Gabbay’s comments, again, reflected more of a shift in style than in substance. Herzog, during his time as Labor chairman, also did not exactly take a pro-peace position, claiming that now was not the time to attempt a two-solution.

Gabbay’s strong statement in favor of keeping the settlements in place did not sit well with others on the left either. Meretz MK Ilan Gilon remarked at the time that Gabbay seemed “to have forgotten that he was chosen to lead the alternative to the Likud.”

Adopting Netanyahu’s disdain for the Left

If pandering to the religious right, threatening an Arab member of his party, and cozying up to the settler lobby wasn’t enough, Gabbay appeared to cross another line when in early November he echoed a famous Netanyahu comment that “the Left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish” — that the Labor party had chosen liberal values at the expense of Jewish values. Adopting a line associated with the beginning of Netanyahu’s tenure generated a firestorm.

The last, or latest, straw

Gabbay’s defenders have insisted that the rightward swing is all part of a strategy to return Labor to power—though it is a strategy that has been tried and failed before.

Yet Gabbay’s new direction for the party became more than just a change in rhetoric this week, when he ordered the party to support a bill that will allow the deportation and indefinite detention of asylum seekers living in Israel. Support for the bill does more than shift Labor’s location on the political map, it could have real consequences: the deportation of tens of thousands of people who have lived in Israel for years, putting many of their lives at risk.

Nine of the Zionist Union’s 23 MKs opposed Gabbay’s decision. Sheli Yachimovitch, the former Labor chairwoman, said it “was morally impossible to support the bill.” Zuheir Bahlul remarked, “I cannot understand how the party can support an immoral, right-wing proposal to send the refugees to hell.”

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My Comments :

1. That the Israeli Labour party is overtly and unconditionally defending the racist and colonial policies of the extreme-right Netanyahu government, delivers further evidence for the educated  premises, that both political currents (in the ME context) in essence - for in geo-political doctrine and the structural / existential abuse against the indigenous people (i.e. the Palestinians) - do not principally differ from each other.

2. The UK Labour party might therefor praise itself very lucky that she has been freely offered the ("temporary") break-up of relations with a party that no truly socialist party would want to be associated with in the first place, EVER...

3. Meanwhile it does also deliver additional proof, that the ongoing smear attacks against Corbyn  et al. - under the false pretext of anti-semitism - are merely against the to be expected BDS policies that undoubtedly will be implemented, as soon as Corbyn will have become PM.

4. BDS policies, as well as the to be expected, much more balanced and much more international law based - versus the law of the jungle, that has been endorsed by so many western governments (including the Tel Aviv regime) for too long now - approach of the ME, than any UK government before the hopefully soon to be formed, future Labour Corbyn government. 

5. Paradoxically the latter does also proof beyond reasonable doubt, that BDS is an effective - for apparently (rightly) feared economical - weapon against the western colonial policies in the ME during the last centennium.

6. The entire smear attacks against Corbyn do proof as well, that some foreign actors are fully allowed to try to decisively intervene into the party and election politics of a (in this respect) sovereign nation like the UK, while other foreign actors are being accused of illegal political interference, while entertaining the very same tactics and trying to achieve the very same goals..

Protests in Gaza are leading to many deaths and injuries among Palestinians, yet Israel has faced little criticism

PATRICK COCKBURN

Protests in Gaza are leading to many deaths and injuries among Palestinians, yet Israel has faced little criticism

The political price of besieging or blockading urban areas like Gaza is rising because it is impossible to prevent information about the sufferings of those trapped inside such an enclaves becoming public

April 6 2018



The sheer scale of the casualties on the first day of the protest a week ago is striking, with as many as 16 killed and 1,415 injured, of whom 758 were hit by live fire according to Gaza health officials Reuters

Thousands of protesters returned to the border this Friday, burning great heaps of tyres to produce a black smokescreen which they hoped would hide them from Israeli snipers. Gaza’s health ministry has said that five people were killed and 1,070 people were wounded on Friday, including 293 by live fire. 

The demonstrators know what to expect. A video from the first day of the march shows a protester being shot in the back by an Israeli sniper as he walks away from the fence separating Gaza from Israel. In other footage, Palestinians are killed or wounded as they pray, walk empty-handed towards the border fence, or simply hold up a Palestinian flag. All who get within 300 yards are labelled “instigators” by the Israeli army, whose soldiers have orders to shoot them. 

“Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed,” claimed a tweet from the Israeli military the day after the mass shooting on 30 March at the start of 45 days of what Palestinians call the “Great March of Return” to the homes they had in Israel 70 years ago. The tweet was deleted soon after, possibly because film had emerged of a protester being shot from behind.

The sheer scale of the casualties on the first day of the protest a week ago is striking, with as many as 16 killed and 1,415 injured, of whom 758 were hit by live fire according to Gaza health officials. These figures are contested by Israel, which says that the injured numbered only a few dozen. But Human Rights Watch spoke to doctors at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City who said that they had treated 294 injured demonstrators, mostly “with injuries to the lower limbs from live ammunition”.

Imagine for a moment that it was not the two million Palestinian in Gazay, Lebanon and Jordan who had staged a march to return to the homes that they have lost in Syria since 2011. Suppose that, as they approach the Syrian border, they were fired on by the Syrian army and hundreds of them were killed or injured. Syria would certainly claim that the demonstrators were armed and dangerous, though this would be contradicted by the absence of casualties among the Syrian military. 

The international outcry against the murderous Syrian regime in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin would have echoed around the world. Boris Johnson would have denounced Assad as a butcher and Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, would have held up pictures of the dead and dying before the Security Council. 

Of course, Israel would furiously deny that there was any parallel between the two situations. Its government spokesman, David Keyes, rebuked CNN for even using the word “protest” when “what actually happened is that Hamas engineered an event where they wanted thousands of people to swarm into Israel, to crush Israel, to commit acts of terror. Indeed, we have captured on camera pictures of people shooting guns, people placing bombs, people shooting rockets.” 

In the event, no pictures of these supposedly well-armed protesters ever emerged. But four days later, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled Israel: Gaza Killings Unlawful, Calculated. Officials Green-Light Shooting of Unarmed Demonstrators, which said that it “could find no evidence of any protester using firearms”. It added that footage published by the Israeli army showing two men shooting at Israeli troops turned out not to have been filmed at the protest. 

Israeli ministers are unabashed by the discrediting of claims that the demonstrators pose a military threat to Israel. Defence minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Israeli soldiers had “warded off Hamas military branch operatives capably and resolutely ... They have my full backing.” The free-fire policy is continuing as before and, as a result, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, has launched a campaign called “Sorry Commander I Cannot Shoot”, which encourages soldiers to refuse to shoot unarmed civilians on the grounds that this is illegal.  

Why is the surge in Palestinian protests coming now and why is Israel responding so violently? There is nothing new in Palestinian demonstrations about the loss of their land and Israel’s aggressive military response. But there may be particular reasons that a confrontation is happening now, such as Palestinian anger at President Trump’s decision in December to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the move of the US embassy to there from Tel Aviv. This trumpeted Washington’s unconditional support for the Israeli position and the US disregard for the Palestinians and any remaining hopes they might have to win at least some concessions with US support. 

Strong support from the Trump administration is reported by the Israeli press to be further reason why the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, feels that bad publicity over the shootings in Gaza will not damage Israel’s position in the US. In the past, controversy over the mass killings of Palestinian or Lebanese by Israel has sometimes provoked a negative US response that has curbed Israel’s use of force. 

So far, Israel has faced little criticism from an international media uninterested in the Gaza story, or else is happy to go along with Israel’s interpretation of events. The vocabulary used by news outlets is often revealing: for instance, the BBC website on 31 March had a headline reading “Gaza-Israel border: Clashes ‘leave 16 Palestinians dead and hundreds injured”. The word “clashes” implies combat between two groups capable of fighting each other, though, as Human Rights Watch says, the demonstrators pose no threat to an all-powerful Israeli military machine – a point reinforced by the fact that all the dead and wounded are Palestinian. 

Possibly, the Israelis are miscalculating the impact of excessive use of force on public opinion: in the age of wifi and the internet, graphic images of the victims of violence are immediately broadcast to the world, often with devastating effect. As in Syria and Iraq, the political price of besieging or blockading urban areas like Gaza or Eastern Ghouta is rising because it is impossible to prevent information about the sufferings of those trapped inside such an enclaves becoming public, though this may have no impact on the course of events.  

Contrary to Keyes’ claims, the idea of a mass march against the fence seems to have first emerged in social media in Gaza and was only later adopted by Hamas. It is the only strategy likely to show results for the Palestinians because they have no military option, no powerful allies and their leadership is moribund and corrupt. But they do have numbers: a recent report to the Israeli Knesset saying that there are roughly 6.5 million Palestinian Arabs and an equal number of Jewish Israeli citizens in Israel and the West Bank, not counting those in East Jerusalem and Gaza. Israel has usually had more difficulty in dealing with non-violent civil rights type mass movements among Palestinians than it has had fighting armed insurgencies. 

Keyes claims that the demonstrations are orchestrated by Hamas, but here again he is mistaken on an important point because witnesses on the spot say that the impetus for the protests is coming from non-party groups and individuals. They voice frustration with the failed, divided and self-seeking Palestinian leaders of both Hamas and Fatah. The most dangerous aspect of the situation in terms of its potential for violence may be that nobody is really in charge.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-palestine-gaza-march-of-return-protest-deaths-a8292601.html