We have spent the last month meticulously reading, watching, listening to and analysing what the UK media had to say about Israel’s operation in Gaza (within the limits of our scope of monitoring). Our objective has been to see whether the coverage was balanced, impartial and factually accurate. Had any lessons been learnt since Lebanon 2006 when, in the eyes of many, the media got it so wrong?

Here’s a brief selection from our findings.

Our first observation concerns a key failing across the BBC and the broadsheets: a virtual absence of communication to audiences about who Hamas actually are and what they represent. We ran a simple index looking for mentions of facts such as:

· Hamas does not recognise Israel
· Hamas calls for Israel’s destruction in its Charter
· Hamas refuses to renounce violence against Israelis
· Hamas has a history of violence against Israelis
· Hamas does not accept previous peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians

The results are startling. Only 5% of news articles in the broadsheet newspapers made any reference to any of these indicators. Of 18 reports on the Today Programme, one made reference to Hamas’ Charter and the rest made no mention of any of the other indicators, and of ten programmes on the BBC Six and Ten O’clock news, only one included an interview excerpt with Tzipi Livni saying that Hamas ‘cannot accept my right to exist’. This was the only mention of any of the indicators by a quoted source or BBC correspondent. These findings indicate that the journalists behind these reports simply did not view these facts as relevant to the conflict.

Looking at the images in the media, only 4% of all the photographs published about the conflict in the first week depicted Hamas militancy and only one photograph of a rocket launcher appeared in the broadsheets. And in cartoons, more than 75% of all editorial cartoons published over the three-week conflict period depicted Israel as the aggressor, whereas only a quarter even featured depictions of armed Hamas fighters.

Another key failure specifically relates to our national broadcaster. The BBC consistently failed to make the crucial distinction between opinion and fact. The source of the confusion, to a significant extent, is the still highly ambiguous role of Jeremy Bowen: the Middle East ‘Editor.’ As an editor, Jeremy Bowen is permitted to ‘editorialise’ the news, which he does by rendering his reports highly personalised. All of which is fine, as long as any kind of editorialisation is clearly marked as an opinion piece. But this is not what the BBC does. In his daily Gaza diary on the BBC website, the Middle East Editor was given free reign to publish his own partial and emotive opinions. These demonstrated a clear sympathy with the Palestinian case and clear hostility towards Israeli perspectives. For example:

‘Back on 6 January I wrote in this diary about one of the most affecting pieces of video I had seen coming out of Gaza. For me, it is still the most memorable single image of the war. It showed a young Palestinian father kissing his dead baby son goodbye. He was murmuring farewells to his boy and I defy anyone to view it and not be profoundly moved. I was frustrated that I did not even know the names of the man and his son…But I wanted to know more about the man, much more. After a couple of days in Gaza I can tell you a great deal about him…And I am glad that I can finally put a name to a face.’ 23rd January 2009.

As well as a preponderance of entries focusing on personal stories of Palestinians, there was an unmistakable cynicism displayed towards Israel running through the series. On numerous occasions, he made reference to the ‘Israeli narrative’ and ‘Israeli message’, but never once referred to a Palestinian ‘narrative’ or ‘message’. The implication here is that Israeli positions are ‘versions’ and Palestinian positions are reality.

‘Israel has been able to put across its narrative, that it is acting in self defence and doing all it can not to kill civilians. But it has been countered by the sheer weight of images of suffering from Gaza, which have inspired protests across the world.’ 12 January 2009

‘I’m struck by the constant Israeli message that ‘any other country in the world would do the same’. Would they?’ 13 January 2009

Not once in all of the TV coverage we monitored did Mr Bowen tell the personal story of an Israeli. And nowhere in his diary was it made clear that this was his personal opinion and not that of the BBC.

The BBC Editor also slipped personal opinion into some of his news reports. For example, in the late night news on 27 December 2008, he made the assertion in the middle of a news report that

‘Hamas has not been part of the last year of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The talks have largely ignored Gaza, which is a fundamental diplomatic failure.’

Whether the exclusion of Hamas (regarded by the EU and US as a terrorist organization) from last year’s negotiations constitutes a ‘fundamental diplomatic failure’ is a matter of opinion and not of fact.

And on the Ten O’Clock News on 5 January 2009:

‘Israel says it tries not to hurt them – all this is the fault of Hamas. Try telling that to the people in Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals.’
Here, the use of the phrase ‘try telling that to’ is a subtle but effective way of conveying to the viewer that Israel’s assertions should be treated with suspicion or indifference.

Both of these examples constitute breaches of the BBC Editorial Guideline on impartiality:

‘Our journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy. Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters.’

To their credit, the BBC’s news journalists did regularly report what life in Sderot was like and show images of rockets falling, one landing perilously close to Jeremy Bowen himself. Paul Wood especially deserves praise for his balance and detached perspective.

However, there was one other area where the BBC did not manage to convey crucial information to audiences: in acknowledging the deaths of Hamas terrorists as part of the overall casualty rate. Despite understandably heavy focus on Israel’s media ban, there was no mention until after the ceasefire of the danger that Hamas might be influencing the statistics and sources coming out of Gaza. And so each night, the BBC reeled off casualty figures sourced from ‘Palestinian medics’. Only on one occasion did the BBC TV evening news programmes break the figure down into civilian versus non-civilian casualties. 11% of broadcasts on the Today Programme broke down the figure. In contrast, of the 48 broadsheet articles which gave a figure for the number of Palestinians reportedly killed, 40% attempted to make the distinction. So the general impression made was that all casualties were civilian, rather than a combination of civilian and Hamas.

Improvements in coverage were certainly detected in some areas: in the amount of time and space allocated to quoting Israeli spokespeople; in the overall stance taken by the UK’s broadsheets in their editorial pieces (34% were classified as ‘neutral’ about Israel’s operation in Gaza, 32% took a ‘less favourable’ stance and 34% were ‘more favourable’) and in the BBC’s coverage of both perspectives of the conflict in its news reports. It was principally in Jeremy Bowen’s opinion pieces that the BBC did not provide balance

However, when it came to arguably some of the more influential areas of reporting, we detected serious shortcomings, particularly at the BBC. We have seen the privileging of reporters’ own opinions at the expense of a full presentation of the facts and issues. As a result, core journalistic principles have been compromised.

To view our full report, go to www.justjournalism.com

IDF soldiers are given strict orders in terms of combat procedures as per IDF moral code; the IDF tells them when it is appropriate risk their lives, to save others, and to shoot. The details are numerous, but the basic outline is as follows:

IDF soldiers have three priorities in combat, and they are listed here in order of priority (all quotes in italics are taken directly from the IDF Moral Code):

1. Accomplish the mission

"The IDF soldiers view their service in the IDF as a mission; They will be ready to give their all in order to defend the state, its citizens and residents."

2. Protect oneself and comrades

"The IDF servicemen and women will act out of fraternity and devotion to their comrades, and will always go to their assistance when they need their help or depend on them, despite any danger or difficulty, even to the point of risking their lives."

"The IDF servicemen and women will act in a judicious and safe manner in all they do, out of recognition of the supreme value of human life. During combat they will endanger themselves and their comrades only to the extent required to carry out their mission."

3. Avoid collateral damage (damage to civilians and their property)

"The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat."

Believe it or not, it's moral and lawful for those guns to be used. Among other things, implicit in the IDF moral code is the fact that soldiers risk their own lives in two cases: in order to accomplish a mission and in order to save the lives of their comrades. Individual soldiers are not permitted to risk their own lives in order to avoid collateral damage or to save civilians, and there is nothing peculiar or immoral about this in terms of military protocol. The United States Army, along with most standing armies, have the same principle.

The IDF warns civilians about incursions and goes through leaps and bounds to plan missions, on a strategic level, that are designed to keep civilians in mind. During Operation Cast Lead, the IDF even went as far as to reroute missiles already on their way to targets in Gaza, due to the fact that too many civilians 'gathered' (they were most likely being used as human shields by Hamas) near the original targets. Individual soldiers, however, must first accomplish their missions and protect themselves and their comrades-- these are the rules of war, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a military that does not follow the same protocol. Naturally, in this case, there are civilian casualties.

Even though the IDF's moral code is listed on its official website and is written in various publications for all to see, the IDF's PR front doesn't exactly advertise the fact that combat soldiers have a defined list of priorities that does not call for sparing the lives of civilians in all cases. Given the indisputable fact that this moral code is lawful, it should be advertised. During Operation Cast Lead, those speaking for the IDF repeatedly said that the IDF does 'everything that it can' to prevent civilian casualties. This is overwhelmingly true when it comes to senior officials planning missions, but the IDF failed to make it clear that there are situations in which it views civilian deaths as unfortunate, but justified. The obvious example is one in which civilians are killed because they were used as human shields by Hamas, who wouldn't allow them to vacate buildings, homes, schools, and other areas that Hamas used as military targets, despite having been warned before attacks by the IDF; the IDF considers these deaths to have been caused by Hamas, and rightfully so. The other example of civilian deaths that the IDF considers within the bounds of morality and legality is less obvious, and those are the deaths that happen due to a soldier's adherence to the IDF moral code and its list of priorities. Why should the IDF make this clear in the press?

The fact that IDF Moral Code is not made clear worldwide is a major part of the reason that much of the media call the IDF a bunch of liars, though not always in so many words. We say that we do everything possible to avoid civilian deaths, and next to these quotes from senior military officials, you'll find photos of dead Palestinian civilians. The truth is that, like any other military at war, we have a list of priorities. Contrary to popular belief, the principle of proportionality within the realm of international law does not relate to the number of civilians that are killed during war. Rather, it demands that the civilian casualties and property damage must be in proportion to the significance of the military target as it directly relates to the completion of military objectives. If the IDF kills 15 civilians when bombing a house that a Hamas operative once visited for a cup of tea, that is disproportionate. If , during a war whose objective is to decrease the ability for Hamas to carry out attacks against Israel, 15 civilians are killed when the IAF bombs the Hamas Government Complex, from which the planning of terror attacks occurs, this is not disproportionate. In addition, a soldier's life comes before a civilian in enemy territory, and even those that ideologically massacre principles of war in the name of 'international law' specifically when talking about the IDF, can't argue that this principle is illegal. As such, it would be to the IDF's benefit if it were forthcoming about its moral code. Those tragic photographs of dead civilians may be tragic, but why make it easy for the media to call us liars? Our moral code doesn't state that we protect civilians in all cases, and we need to explain that to the world.

Israel would have much less of an image problem if its PR front had the strength of the IDF's convictions.

In the end, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the UN General Assembly, decided not to attend the Holocaust commemoration ceremonies at UN Headquarters here in New York. One can speculate endlessly as to why D’Escoto - whose choice of metaphor to describe Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians is “crucifixion” - bowed out. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want to be in a room where he wasn’t welcome; perhaps something inside him dreaded the prospect of looking actual Holocaust survivors in the eye just a few months after he embraced the world’s most well-known exponent of Holocaust denial; perhaps (let us not forget those who will inevitably say this) he was “leaned on” or “pressured” or “prevented” by you-know-who.

D’Escoto did, however, send a message to the gathering, read out by Rwanda’s UN Envoy. In its tone and substance, the message was supremely safe and eminently laudable, if completely unoriginal. The Holocaust was a consequence of demonizing Others (”Roma, communists, gays and lesbians, and most of all Jews.”) Its most basic lesson, if the cry “Never Again!” is to have meaning, is the need for tolerance. The election of President Obama is an inspiring demonstration of where such tolerance can lead.

Anyone who knows D’Escoto’s reputation will have a field day picking holes in these remarks. The word “genocide” is mentioned several times, for example, but no current examples are provided. In another setting, D’Escoto would doubtless have pointed to the conflict in Gaza, which he regards, as he told Al Jazeera, as a “genocide.” In this setting, though, a mention of Darfur would have been more appropriate. But Darfur didn’t figure. Its absence might be put down to the fact that Palestine’s international partisans, like D’Escoto, are irritated by talk of the slaughter there, which they regard as a Zionist plot to change the subject. A likelier explanation still is that the UN doesn’t regard what is happening in Darfur as a genocide.

Acts of recognition and commemoration can be very confusing, therefore, particularly in the inverted world of the UN, where a genocide can be recast as a “civil war in which all sides are committing atrocities” and, equally, a nasty regional conflict in which culpability can be distributed among several parties is suddenly defined as a “genocide.”

Why is this? Our view of history -- more precisely, the way in which we remember the recent past in the public domain - generally tends to be cluttered by the political imperatives of the present. Holocaust Memorial Day 2009 demonstrates this beautifully. The furore in New York over D’Escoto was based upon a sense, particularly among Jewish organizations, that his attendance would soil the event. Just by being there in person, many observers said, he would have shifted attention away from the past crimes of the Holocaust to the present allegations of “Israeli genocide.”

Try, though, to imagine D’Escoto in another context. Were he a local government official in Catalunya, he would not have delivered a speech either in person or through a surrogate; there would have been no event at which to hear such a speech. Instead, he would be defending the statement that “marking the Jewish Holocaust while a Palestinian Holocaust is taking place is not right.” Ditto if he served with the local authority in the Swedish town of Lulea. Or if he was an official of the Muslim Council of Britain.

The point is this: the objection to D’Escoto was never really about his physical presence. In another country he would have been visible by his purposeful absence. Rather, it centered upon fears about the representation of the Holocaust.

In the last few weeks, the Holocaust has been commemorated, in a manner of speaking, nearly every day: it is present in the accusations of genocide committed by the IDF, it is audible in the comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, it is visible in the banners which equate the Star of David with the swastika. No-one, believe me, has forgotten the Holocaust. Even those who deny its occurrence, like the Iranian President, perpetuate the discussion about it.

And that is why I was left profoundly uncomfortable with the final sentence of D’Escoto’s remarks: “Let us remember and learn about the crimes of the past in order to prevent them today and in the future.” A harmless platitude, you might think? Maybe, had that sentence had been uttered by a schoolchild, or by a diplomat whose only concern is protocol. But coming from a man who has too often turned the lessons of the Holocaust against Jews themselves, and who believes that Jews have morphed into their persecutors, it sounds very, very sinister.

Israeli troops are withdrawing from Gaza, yet we are seeing Palestinian schools and hospitals being used as centres for ‘brutal torture’, Palestinians kidnapped at funerals, Palestinians shot in the legs and their hands broken, Palestinians summarily executed on trumped up charges. Israeli war crimes? No, it’s not the work of the IDF; all this comes courtesy of the ruling Islamist faction of the Palestinian ‘resistance’. We have seen recently a number of Western commentators playing down the violence inherent in Hamas’s ideology and world view. We hear much of the ‘democratically elected Hamas’, and now we see, yet again, the reality of rule by Hamas.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Hamas militiamen have rounded up hundreds of Fatah activists on suspicion of “collaboration” with Israel during Operation Cast Lead, Fatah members in the Gaza Strip told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

They said the Hamas crackdown on Fatah intensified after the cease-fire went into effect early Sunday morning.

The Fatah members and eyewitnesses said the detainees were being held in school buildings and hospitals that Hamas had turned into make-shift interrogation centers.

[...]

A Fatah official in Ramallah told the Post that at least 100 of his men had been killed or wounded as a result of the massive Hamas crackdown. Some had been brutally tortured, he added.

The official said that the perpetrators belonged to Hamas’s armed wing, Izaddin Kassam, and to the movement’s Internal Security Force.

According to the official, at least three of the detainees had their eyes put out by their interrogators, who accused them of providing Israel with wartime information about the location of Hamas militiamen and officials.

[...]

“They were afraid to confront the Israeli army and many Hamas militiamen even ran away during the fighting,” he said. “Hamas is now venting its anger and frustration against our Fatah members there.”

Eyewitnesses said that Hamas militiamen had turned a number of hospitals and schools into temporary detention centers where dozens of Fatah members and supporters were being held on suspicion of helping Israel during the war.

The eyewitnesses said that a children’s hospital and a mental health center in Gaza City, as well as a number of school buildings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, were among the places that Hamas had turned into “torture centers.”

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas’s house-arrest orders.

“What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah,” he said. “Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?”

[...]

Relatives of Abed al-Gharabli, a former Fatah security officer who spent 12 years in Israeli prisons, said he was kidnapped by a group of Hamas militiamen who shot him in both legs after severely torturing him.

Ziad Abu Hayeh, one of the commanders of Fatah’s armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, is reported to have lost his sight after Hamas gunmen put out his eyes. According to Fatah activists, Abu Hayeh was kidnapped from his home in Khan Yunis by Hamas militiamen.

The Fatah men said that in a number of incidents, Hamas militiamen had kidnapped Fatah activists while they were attending the funerals of people killed during the war. In other cases, activists were detained and shot in the legs after they were spotted smiling in public - an act interpreted by Hamas as an expression of joy over Israel’s military offensive.

On Saturday night, three brothers from the Subuh family were abducted by Hamas militiamen and taken to the Abdel Aziz Rantisi Mosque in Khan Yunis, where they were shot in the legs, a local journalist told the Post.

In a more recent incident, Hamas gunmen shot and killed 80-year-old Hisham Tawfik Najjar after storming his home and beating his four sons - all Fatah activists.

Fahmi Za’areer, a Fatah spokesman in the West Bank, revealed that at least 16 Fatah activists had been executed by Hamas in the past few days. He strongly condemned the Hamas clampdown on Fatah and warned against a bloodbath in the Gaza Strip.

Here is DeeDee Guttenplan in the Guardian:

I remember writing privately to the leaders of Stop the War expressing discomfort over signs equating the Star of David with the swastika and headbands glorifying suicide bombing, and getting an extremely hostile (and self-righteous) response for my trouble. Which didn’t stop me from turning out on the streets.
…
During the Spanish civil war the American poet Archibald MacLeish was attacked by Trotskyists for his willingness to support a democratically elected Spanish government led by communists, and dependent on the Soviet Union for arms. MacLeish replied:

“The man who refuses to defend his convictions, for fear he may defend them in the wrong company, has no convictions.”

DeeDee could have demonstrated the strength of his convictions by marching with these demonstrators, yesterday, in Melbourne:

Or, had he taken a trip to Calgary, he could have joined with the the Aryan Guard, who appear for some reason to have developed an affection for Hamas:

From the National Post:

Event organizer Shadi Abuid—who last made news a few years back as a university student when he brought to Calgary Norman Finkelstein, the popular anti-Israel author of “The Holocaust Industry”—told Canwest Global he was impressed with the “various groups uniting under one voice.” He explained that he had “directly told” the neo-Nazis that he’d prefer they didn’t join the march. “But in these demonstrations you can control the crowd but you can’t control the emotions . . . you can’t deny people’s right to walk,” he shrugged.

That’s true. Except, many of the same organizers behind Saturday’s march attempted to deny the freedom-to-demonstrate of an Israeli supporter just the other week. At a protest in front of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s constituency office in southwest Calgary January 2nd, Gazan supporters called the cops to complain when one man showed up waving an Israeli flag. There were 150 pro-Palestinian protestors, but the single Israeli supporter was told by police that he must leave or be charged with “inciting civil disorder,” according to this account (with photos). Protestors reportedly cursed at and threw shoes at the man. 

Finally, on a connected subject, and without spoiling it by googling, who said this:

I have long raged against any comparisons with the Second World War – whether of the Arafat-is-Hitler variety once deployed by Menachem Begin or of the anti-war-demonstrators-are-1930s-appeasers, most recently used by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. And pro-Palestinian marchers should think twice before they start waffling about genocide when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem once shook Hitler’s hand and said – in Berlin on 2 November 1943, to be precise – “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews… They have definitely solved the Jewish problem.” The Grand Mufti, it need hardly be added, was a Palestinian. He lies today in a shabby grave about two miles from my Beirut home.

No, the real reason why “Gaza-Genocide” is a dangerous parallel is because it is not true. Gaza’s one and a half million refugees are treated outrageously enough, but they are not being herded into gas chambers or forced on death marches. That the Israeli army is a rabble is not in question – though I was amused to read one of Newsweek’s regular correspondents calling it “splendid” last week – but that does not mean they are all war criminals. The issue, surely, is that war crimes do appear to have been committed in Gaza. Firing at UN schools is a criminal act. It breaks every International Red Cross protocol. There is no excuse for the killing of so many women and children. 

(Via Norm and Tim Blair)

Gene adds: Here’s one from Washington, DC:

Despite the gracious and fraternal tone of A.B. Yehoshua's letter to Gideon Levy in Haaretz, the concluding paragraph has a curious effect on the letter's contents:

Please, preserve the moral authority and concern that you possessed, and your distinctive voice. We will need them again in the future, which promises further ordeals on the road to peace. In the meantime, it would be best for us all - we and the Palestinians and the rest of the world - to follow the simple moral imperative of Kantian philosophy: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Curious because, well, one may as well condescendingly remind an astronomer of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, and implore them to apply it across the board. Kant was a great thinker on the limits of reason  and a compelling enough moral thinker on many fronts, but the categorical imperative is only his famous, not the most useful of his contributions. Most have heard of it, but few have heard of the Problem of the Enquiring Murderer. It goes like this: according to the Kantian imperative, we should all tell the truth all the time. So what if a murderer asks you to disclose the location of a person he wants to kill?

The imperative neglects the fact that two notions of the good can often conflict. Many of our most fiercely debated issues of the day hinge on how adamant one is about the correctness of his or her judgment regarding which of several conflicting goods is greatest. Take Iraq, for instance. It can hardly be disputed that civilian casualties and a five year occupation are bad and that it would have been good to have avoided both. And yet, the discontinued existence of Saddam Hussein's regime is a good thing, too. Tempers rise and explode over this question of conflicting goods. Kant is of no use to us in these moments...unless one hopes to lend the sheen of universality to one's own assessment of the good.

Perhaps it is to my slight advantage that I'm not familiar enough with Levy's coverage of the current conflict in Gaza to make a fair assessment of whether Yehoshua's criticisms are fair. To read only the letter, I'm led to conclude that the two have agreed on many key points in the past with regards to Israeli wrongdoing, but that now Yehoshua feels Levy has overstepped the bounds from rational critic to unfair detractor of a just war. He goes on to note several instances where Levy's omissions or judgments have undermined his once-laudable moral authority. But there is sleight of hand here. Despite the fact that many of the most honest pro-Israeli intellectuals doubt the ability of the current military campaign to effectively deter future missile strikes, Yehoshua writes:

All we are trying to do is get their leaders to stop this senseless and wicked aggression, and it is only because of the tragic and deliberate mingling between Hamas fighters and the civilian population that children, too, are unfortunately being killed.

just moments after he points out that he has asked Levy whether he

truly believe[s] that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country.

The consistency Yehoshua demands of Levy would require the realization that the tactics are either both futile or they are both justifiable. But then Yehoshua implies something of great import in the latter statement without coming right out and saying it: Hamas can't be persuaded or dealt with because it its ideology is genocidal and irrational. But if this is so, as I believe it is, then one must also accept that, unless Israel plans to oust Hamas and occupy Gaza (the America-in-Iraq model), no amount of force can be truly thought to be accomplishing forseeable objectives. It is, then, as pointless and doomed to impotence as are Hamas' rocket attacks designed to "open the crossings."

The most depressing thing about the current conflict and the coverage of it is that time and again we are offered two competing visions of the good and treated as if we must be categorical about one or the other. And always the implication from each side rings, as Yehoshua's letter does, of sanctimony and myopia. But Kant had a better lesson. His second formulation of moral law suggests that we treat each individual rational being as an end in itself, never as a mere means to an end. By adhering to this formula, one is permitted to insist on both supposedly competing visions of the good, while also insisting that no rational being be treated as merely a means to that end. One can argue for an end to dual stranglehold on Gaza by Hamas and Israel, remain opposed to Islamist fanaticism as well as colonialism, while remaining opposed to every casualty inflicted as players on each side cynically treat Israeli and Palestinian civilians as means to their supposed end.

Egypt Cites Progress Toward Truce As Gaza Toll Exceeds 1,000 [New York Times]

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, who spent Tuesday in Gaza City, agreed that the situation with civilians was dire but said that the principal hospital was making do with medical supplies, and that doctors, working around the clock, were mostly coping with the flow of the wounded.

“In general, they did not complain about the lack of equipment or material,” he said at a news conference in Jerusalem.

 Palestinian sources: 'Iran unit' of Hamas has been destroyed [Haaretz]

Palestinian sources reported Thursday that the "Iranian Unit" of Hamas, members of the group's military wing trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, had been destroyed.

According to the sources, most of the unit's members were killed in fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood, where they had been deployed by the military leadership of Hamas.

The unit numbered approximately 100 men who had traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps, mostly in the Beka'a Valley, where they were trained in infantry fighting tactics. The militants were also trained in the use of anti-tank missiles, the detonation of explosives, among other skills.

After Hamas' sweeping victory in those elections, the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah intensified. Sayyam set up the Executive Force, a security apparatus that developed into Hamas' police after the militants seized Gaza in June 2007.

An open letter to Gideon Levy, by A.B. Yehoshua  [Haaretz]

When I asked you after the disengagement from Gaza, Gideon, explain to me why they are firing missiles at us, you replied that they want us to open the crossings. I asked you whether you truly believe that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country. I did not get an answer from you.

 ANALYSIS / Egypt's Gaza truce plan is mostly bad for Hamas [Haaretz]

The Egyptian proposal is mostly bad for Hamas. It doesn't let the organization bring the Palestinian public any political achievement that would justify the blood that has been spilled, and even forces on it the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, in the form of its renewed presence at the Rafah crossing (as a condition for its reopening).

Once the cease-fire is reached, the IDF will withdraw from the positions it captured in Gaza, and only then will the two sides begin to discuss the opening of border crossings and removal of the blockade, which was the reason Hamas gave for waging war. The most that Cairo is offering is a timetable for the opening of the crossing points, and even that depends on negotiations due to begin after the cease-fire is reached, and it's tough to know how or when they will end. 

According to Reuters, the main points disputed in the Egyptian proposal as it was articulated on Thursday were the duration of the proposed truce, which Hamas insists on being only a year, and how quickly Israel would complete the withdrawal of its forces from the Gaza Strip and reopen the crossings. The PMO statement on Friday expressed satisfaction with clarifications Gilad received from Cairo on Friday.

Olmert also does not want any agreement to include Hamas as a direct party because this would de facto legitimize the group. His preference, According to Channel 10, was to conclude a ceasefire "over Hamas's head" regardless of the terror group's position, working with Egypt and the US. 

Ed Zwick on Passivity, Jewish Power, and Hamas [Jeffrey Goldberg]

Jeffrey Goldberg: You're opening in Europe. We've heard a lot of talk in Europe comparing what Israel does in the Occupied Territories to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Are you worried about the way the movie will be understood in Europe right now?

Edward Zwick: You know, the argument comparing what the Jews are doing and what the Nazis did is just such a preposterous exaggeration, because one when one uses the word genocide, you have to ask: If Israel were interested in genocide than they have more than the means necessary to accomplish such a thing, and given that, in context, they're using a certain amount of restraint. Yes, I know the word "restraint" is hard to talk about, given what's happening in Gaza, but it is a type of restraint. What I'm responding to is equivalence. Words are important. Genocide is a word thrown around too easily. This is happening now in Poland and Lithuania. There's an attempt to make an equivalence between alleged war crimes of the Bielskis and the Holocaust.

Outside, at a picnic table, a group of reservists, some wearing woolen caps against the night chill, are engaged in a venerable IDF ritual: boiling Turkish coffee in a finjan, a small tin pot. They offer us shot glasses filled with coffee. Some of them are students, some work in high tech. A young man with a shaved head joins us. "He's from the CIA," someone says. "Chef In Action," the guy with the shaved head explains the joke. He is in fact a chef in one of Tel Aviv's up-and-coming restaurants. "We hear the food there is nothing to get excited about," someone says. "Not like what we get here."

In the last few days, a small group has been demonstrating in the entrance of an Air Force base in Tel Aviv. The reason we stand there is that this is the place most air force fighters use to fly to their bases around Israel.

We hold signs calling on them to refuse orders to bomb civilians and children. This is one of many demonstrations against the war held by Israelis and taking place on a daily basis.

This very quiet vigil provokes very strong feelings among passers-by, the military, and the fire brigade across the street. The fire brigade, even though they are not allowed to express political opinions while on duty, threw eggs at us and, when we didn’t move, brought forward their fire engines, with cranes and tried to wash us away.

Since I happened to be on the edge of the vigil, they managed to use one hose to isolate me, and the other to get me soaked wet. When they decided I can’t get any wetter, they kept only the hose they used to separate me from the group, and came together, all in uniform, with their commanding officer, to rip my sign, and to tell me again and again, that I need to get inside the station and (my apologies) give them all head (oral sex).

The under-cover police were there. We kept calling the police asking them to send someone, and they did nothing.

We, at the more extreme left in Israel, always knew that we are, for some, fair game. That we, as they put it so nicely, “should be killed even before the Hamas”. Violence was always part of the response to our activities, but violence by the fire brigades, with the police refusing to act, is a new escalation.

We will continue our demonstrations, and we truly believe in what we do. But at the same time, we know that we are not effective. We are not effective because the media refuses to cover us.

The media in Israel refuses to cover us because it would harm the soldiers’ morale, and because, at times of war, we put democracy on hold and our “brave” media becomes drafted media.

But what about the media outside Israel? After all, they are all so interested in Israel. Why don’t they ever show us? Is it because it is too hard to show that not all is just black and white? Is it because it might not go well with the quite fair anti-Israel motions?

I know. My feelings, my disappointment, my fear, are nothing in comparison to the fear of the people, the families and the children in Gaza. They are also nothing in comparison to the people living in Sderot
and in the south of Israel.

But today, I am afraid.

In my country, I’m a traitor. Fair game. But the minute I leave Israel, I’m an Israeli. Not a lefty. An Israeli, an occupier, and again – fair game.

And my last point is that there can be a million demonstrations around the world against Israel. That won’t make Israel listen. But a million demonstrations for Peace and full coverage of what we do here in Israel
will keep us safer, and might make a difference.

Please, if you know reporters, if you have connections, ask media people to start showing Israeli opposition to the war. It is time our voice is heard.

If you demonstrate, please do it in a way that will make a difference.

Not just anti-Israel, but with signs calling for a cease fire and the acceptance of UN resolution 1860 by both sides.

Stephen Walt, co-author of “The Israel Lobby,” is now a blogger at the revamped Foreign Policy website. In one of his opening salvos, Walt proposes what he calls a “thought experiment,” although one suspects that, for him, this is closer to erotic fantasy:

Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That’s unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.

Here’s the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as “terrorists” and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?

Here’s another: would the United States have even allowed such a situation to arise and persist in the first place?

From the way he poses these two questions, Walt suggests that his answer to both of them is “no.” To arrive at those conclusions though, he has to contort his experiment in such a way as to exclude the likeliest outcome: one which, for political reasons, he’d rather not consider.

Take the fact that the population of Israel in 1967 was 2.9 million. From that, we can conclude that 1.9 million people are missing from Walt’s refugee population. What happened to them? Walt doesn’t say, but it’s not too hard to figure out, if we allow reality to intrude into the experiment for a brief moment. They are all dead.

And they are dead not just because Walt doesn’t account for them. They are dead because - whether in 1967 or 2009 - the elimination of Israel as a sovereign state is possible only through the imposition of massive force against the Israeli population. As Michael Oren notes in his book “Six Days of War,” Cairo Radio was threatening Israel with “death and annihilation” on the eve of the 1967 war, in much the same way as Radio Milles Collines in Rwanda issued bloodcurdling threats to the Tutsi population in 1994 and various Serb broadcasters did the same to the Bosnians between 1992-95. Walt’s thought experiment, therefore, is predicated on the occurrence of genocide.

With that established, let’s then say, in keeping with Walt’s number, that one-third of the Jewish population survives the onslaught. What on earth would they be doing in the Gaza Strip? And why would they be permitted to carry on existing there? Under the terms of Walt’s own experiment, it doesn’t make sense to conceive of somewhere called the Gaza Strip in the first place: that sliver of land would have been subsumed into a territory reunited, as the pro-Hamas demonstrators like to chant, from the river to the sea - and then carved up between Egypt and Syria.

More fundamentally, under the terms of this experiment, it is impossible to conceive of a sizable Jewish population remaining in the environs of Israel/Palestine after such a defeat. The conquering powers would have no reason to end their offensive against the remnants of Israel’s population. Quite who their “sympathizers from the outside world,” as Walt puts it, might be is an utter mystery - The Elders?

There would be no outside body - no UN peacekeeping force, for example - to shepherd the refugees into an adjacent territory, like Gaza, and ensure they were protected from further attacks. For that to happen, the UN would be required to do what it has traditionally been reluctant to do: deploy its Blue Helmets in an offensive capacity, in this case against the armies of three powerful states allied with the oil-rich Gulf monarchies and with plenty of friends among the newly decolonized countries in the General Assembly.

So if the one million Jews can’t go to Gaza, where can they go? To begin with, in a horrible echo of what German Jews were faced with in the 1930s, the answer would not immediately be apparent, and so many more would be slaughtered while they were trying to figure out their final destination. At the end, the number of those spared or lucky enough to get out would thus be far, far smaller.

Having established the consequences of Israel’s military defeat, we can now return to Walt’s two questions. With question one, the answer is still no, but for very different reasons. No, Jews would not be lobbing missiles from “Gaza” into Greater Syria - or whatever the successor state might have been called - because they wouldn’t be there in the first place. And by extension, the US wouldn’t be denouncing them for precisely that same reason: there would be nothing to denounce. What is more conceivable is the prospect that a tiny group among the small band of survivors would have bombed an Arab diplomatic mission in Paris, say, or New York. And the strong likelihood is that the US would have condemned that.

As to question two, if Walt believes that the US would have stepped in to prevent Israel’s defeat in 1967, he is probably right - but the reason has nothing to do with the Israel Lobby. The Six Day War was an excellent example of how Cold War tensions were concentrated in a regional conflagration. An Israeli defeat would have massively boosted Soviet power. The Soviets would have been in virtual control of the Suez Canal. The petrified Gulf monarchies would have done Moscow’s bidding on oil prices and oil supply. In fact, one can arguably say that had the 1967 war resulted in the scenario described in Walt’s thought experiment, the Berlin Wall would still be standing as erect and as forbidding as ever.

“The Israel Lobby,” the book which Walt co-authored with John Mearsheimer, forced the facts to fit its basic thesis - and Walt is doing that again. So driven is he to prove that Israel’s domestic lobby forces the US to follow policies that it otherwise wouldn’t follow, anything contradictory or inconvenient is brushed aside.

Walt is therefore prepared to consider, under the terms of the first question, the existence of a powerful Jewish lobby without a Jewish State. In other words, AIPAC would still exist - it would just have to remove the letter “I” from its acronym. Observes a puzzled Ross Douthat, “…presumably the rump Orthodox Gaza - run, perhaps, by Verbover Jews - wouldn’t have an all-powerful lobby shaping U.S. policy and public opinion to its specifications. Or am I missing something?”

As Megan McArdle correctly remarks, a pro-Israel lobby doesn’t necessarily require a Jewish state - but it is equally true that without one, its prominence would be much diminished. Stephen Walt appears to be saying that, even if the State of Israel had been destroyed in 1967, he and Mearsheimer would still have published their book in 2007. If this is correct, then, at this point, his theory of Jewish power leaves the realm of the real for the realm of the cosmic.

Reading the blogs and the op-ed pages of the newspaper, with the defenders of Israel on one side and the dupes of/supporters of Hamas on the other, it is hard to avoid wondering what the political situation in the Middle East and in the discourse and street politics in the West would look like if there was actually something resembling an active and principled left-wing still in existence.   

By that I mean, a left which is social-democratic, liberal, humanist, anti-fascist, secular, internationalist and having some real links with an effective labour movement. I am talking about an idealised left, of course, untainted by Leninism or nationalism and which would find the current alliance between Trotskyist-Stalinist
groups and Islamists to be unthinkable.   

This is, sadly, a fantasy, but one which hopefully illustrates some of the elements that are sorely missing in these depressing times.

If there was a left in Palestine:

1.    It would, of course, support the key national demands of the Palestinians – for Israel to return to the borders of 1967, for a two state solution, a negotiated agreement on Jerusalem etc – for the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
2.    In doing so it would oppose the deliberate targeting of civilians by terrorist groups and instead seek support with those it share common ground with in Israel and the rest of the world.
3.    It would have been agitating for the authorities in the Palestinian territories to develop the local economy and essential social services such as schools and hospitals.
4.    It would be campaigning for labour rights in the Palestinian territories and strongly protesting the union busting harassment of Hamas.
5.    It would seek to work together with Israeli trade unions to build positive links between workers in both states.
6.    It would insist on the labour movement being part of any negotiations about the future of the region.
7.    It would oppose any attempts to turn Gaza or any other part of the future Palestinian state into an Islamist entity, promote a secular political system and promote and defend basic liberties.
8.    It would seek the support of the international labour movement for its goals – work with international bodies such as the European Union to promote investment in the region and support for the infrastructures of a nascent state.
9.    It would draw on the concrete experience of national democratic movements, in South Africa, Spain, Ireland and so on, who have managed to put behind bitter hatreds and built functioning democratic
societies, making peace with their erstwhile enemies.
10.    Through its political activity it would create a generation of leaders capable of becoming future statesman of a new, free and independent Palestine.

If there was a left in Israel:

1.    It would also support the key national demands of the Palestinians.
2.    It would stridently oppose terrorism and defend Israel's right to peaceful existence in the 1967 borders.
3.    It would promote means to support the development of economic prosperity in both Israel and Palestine.
4.    It would offer solidarity to the Palestinian labour movement as well as fight for the rights of Israeli labor.
5.    It would make clear that it is in the interests, material and otherwise, of ordinary Israelis for there to be a successful Palestinian democracy as neighbour.
6.    It would insist on trade union rights being part of any settlement
for Palestine.
7.    It would promote the full integration and full rights of Arabs in Israel.
8.    It would be a full part of the international labour movement, promoting engagement of trade unions and labour parties with the peace process.
9.    It would oppose all manifestations of chauvinism, religious sectarianism and racism.
10.  Through this process it would create a generation of left-wing politicians, capable of entering into genuine peace negotiations and recreating the original democratic socialist spirit of Israel.

If there was a left in the rest of the world.

1.    It would use all its power to support those in Palestine and Israel who seek a peaceful, two-state solution.
2.    It would give solidarity to both the left in Palestine and the left in Israel and the trade union movement in both states.
3.    It would diplomatically and politically use its power to oppose the attempts of ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics, operating in the west, to undermine any peace plan.
4.    It would make clear the democratic left's opposition to military solutions and to terrorist actions and in favour of peaceful political solutions.
5.    It would make the case for a 'Marshall Plan' style mass investment in both Palestine and Israel to boost the economic and social structures needed for a sustainable peace and reject boycotts and
calls for isolating either state.
6.    It would use its influence in bodies such as the European Union and United Nations to support such a plan and the main demands of its comrades in the Middle East.
7.    It would make clear that racism of any kind, is always inexcusable and to be opposed.
8.    If the peace process came to a halt or was derailed, it would take to the streets to urge support for those working for peace and to oppose those resuming or seeking to resume hostilities.
9.    It would use its influence, where in government, to support those states in the region playing a part in the peace process and to isolate rejectionists.
10.    Through economic and social initiatives it would seek to break down barriers between Israel and other countries in the Middle East.

This is pipe-dreaming of course; idealistic, I know; but isn't that the tragedy of the state of both the Middle East conflict and the left in the world, that such a list of, what would once have been considered standard positions, seems nothing more than wishful thinking?

Instead we have a world of Hamas and Likud and of an international left which marches with anti-semites, glorifies terrorism and declares its solidarity with Islamism – the main obstacle to peace.

Peter Tatchell says:

The London-based press watchdog, Arab Media Watch (AMW), has produced research demonstrating that British press reporting of the Middle East conflict has massively favoured the Israeli Ambassador to the almost complete exclusion of the Palestinian Ambassador.

A statement released by Arab Media Watch “expresses concern at the frequent use by the British press of Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor, compared with the near-total absence of his Palestinian counterpart Manuel Hassassian.”

AMW’s claim of bias is supported by London-based human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell:

“This research shows that the Israeli Ambassador has received 2,000% more UK national press coverage than his Palestinian opposite number, Ambassador Hassassian. Such bias does not give the British people a balanced perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the tragic events in the Palestinian territories. The non-reportage of Mr Hassassian is particularly regrettable because he is a voice of Palestinian moderation, peace and constructive dialogue. By denying him coverage, the press is handing a propaganda victory to Israel and Hamas and allowing the hawks on both sides to dominate the public debate,” said Mr Tatchell.

According to AMW’s survey, from the time that Mr Prosor became Israeli Ambassador to the UK at the end of 2007 until the end of 2008, there have been 40 items (news articles, commentaries, editorials and letters) either by him, quoting him or mentioning him in British national newspapers.

In contrast, during the same period, Ambassador Hassassian has been mentioned only twice in the UK national press – both times in the Guardian, quoted in two articles by Middle East editor Ian Black. This is 20 times fewer mentions than Mr Prosor.

Mr Prosor has been reported in the following newspapers:

Newspaper                 No. of              % of
                                    Items              Items

Daily Telegraph            16                     40
The Times                      6                     15
The Guardian                 5                     12.5
The Independent            5                     12.5
Daily Mail                      3                      7.5
The Sun                          1                      2.5
Daily Mirror                   1                      2.5
Daily Star                       1                      2.5
News of the World         1                      2.5
The Observer                 1                      2.5

“For the sake of balance, this should be rectified, particularly given the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the frequency with which it is reported, and the regular use of Prosor,” said AMW chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi. Our findings call into question Prosor’s complaint in the Telegraph that ‘coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is routinely tainted with bias’ against his country. Prosor’s views are clearly and overwhelmingly more prevalent than his Palestinian counterpart.”

Nashashibi added:

“Hassassian is an able and eloquent spokesman who is readily available to the media.  Making use of him would contribute to a sense of even-handedness in British press coverage, which would benefit readers.”

AMW expresses particular concern over the coverage by the Telegraph, not just because of the frequent platform it provides Mr Prosor, but because AMW has been writing to the newspaper since July 2008 requesting an explanation for the total absence of Hassassian in its pages. We have yet to receive a reply, though we have been promised one three times.

Here is a breakdown of the national press coverage of the Israeli Ambassador

Mr Prosor has authored six commentaries:

-   three in the Telegraph
-   two in the Guardian
-   one in the Sun

A further four commentaries quoted him: three in the Telegraph (two by Con Coughlin, one by David Hughes), one in the Times (Hugo Rifkind)

Mr Prosor was quoted in 18 news articles:  six in the Telegraph (including by Martin Beckford, Tim Butcher,
Duncan Gardham and  Con Coughlin), four in the Times (James Hider and Richard Beeston), three in the Independent (two by Donald Macintyre, one by Ian Johnston),  one each in the Mail (Liz Thomas), Guardian (Toni O’Loughlin), Daily Mirror (Andrew Gregory), Daily Star (anonymous) and Observer (David Hills)

He was mentioned in a further 10 news articles: two each in the Telegraph (Charlotte Bailey and Tom Peterkin),
the Mail (Alex Brummer and  anonymous), Guardian (Rory McCarthy and Toni O’Loughlin) the Independent (Ian Herbert, Andy McSmith and Mark Hughes), and  once each in the Times (Ruth Gledhill) and News of the World (anonymous)

The Telegraph also published a letter by Prosor, and an editorial mentioning him.

This one-sided coverage of the Israeli Ambassador to the exclusion of the Palestinian Ambassador is evidence of partisanship, which does not ensure balance, understanding or progress towards a solution to the Middle East conflict.

My thoughts are as follows.

First of all, as anybody who works in PR will know, the frequency with which a prominent person appears in a newspaper is directly proportional to the effort that a person put into getting themselves into print. If the Palestinian Ambassador isn’t appearing in print, the most likely explanation is either that he is no good at punting himself around news organisations, or that he is keeping a low profile.

One reason that the Ambassador might be keeping a low profile, since the Hamas coup, and particularly since the start of the Gaza conflict, is that there are a number of questions that would inevitably be asked by a journalist, that a sensible Fatah aligned diplomat might not want asked. He might well want to avoid questions - particularly during the Fatah-Hamas unity negotiations - that would have highlighted the depth of the split between the two parties, and the subsequent civil war in which many Palestinians were killed, and Fatah activists repressed and defeated. I can understand perfectly why he might wish to avoid  washing his country’s dirty linen in public.

It is also no secret that Fatah has, at the very least, mixed emotions at the destruction visited upon its enemies, Hamas, accompanied as it is by the deaths of many unaligned and wholly innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Pretty much anything he might say would be seized upon by Hamas, and used against the Palestinian authority.

The Palestinian Authority is also essentially a bystander in this conflict. It isn’t firing missiles. It isn’t even in control of the Gaza strip. Why would the Palestinian Ambassador want to demonstrate its marginality, by press exposure that highlighted its impotence, at this time.

I suspect that Arab Media Watch knows all this too.

So many friends have been asking me about what's happening in Gaza, and who the actors are, that I thought I'd shed some light on one side of this complex conflict. This is a short history of Fatah, the group opposed to Hamas in what is essentially a Palestinian civil war currently interrupted by the Israel-Gaza war.

Fatah is the main political wing within the PLO, which Yasir Arafat founded in 1964 as a group that relied on terror tactics to advance its goals of creating a Palestinian entity in what had been the British Mandate, and thereby destroying the Jewish state. Fatah is an Arabic word which recalls the first burst of Islamic expansion in the 8th century CE, which is when Islam effectively took over what we now consider the Middle East, including north Africa, Spain and the Balkans.

Since it's founding the PLO attacked Israeli civilians, non-Israeli Jews, and tried to take over neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon so they could launch a war against Israel and become a regional power. It considers itself a leftist liberation group which, in this part of the world, means that while being Muslim, it is not religious in nature, or motivated by the jihadi worldview of Hamas, Iran, Al Qaeda, though it has often played to Islamic themes, particularly to drum up domestic support.

By the late 1960s the PLO grew in stature and tried to take over Jordan in a slow-moving guerrilla war. The Jordanian government violently responded and in September, 1970 it killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in what became known as Black September. The PLO was expelled to Lebanon, during which Syria killed thousands of Palestinians as the various actors in the area -- Christians, secularists, Sunnis and Shias -- jockeyed for power. The PLO arrival in Lebanon and attacks on other Lebanese factions helped destabilize the country and plunge it into the civil war that would last until the mid-1990's. In 1978, the PLO committed one of the worst terror attacks in Israeli history, known today as the Coastal Road Massacre, prompting an Israeli military incursion into southern Lebanon to push the PLO off the Israeli border. In the years that followed, taking advantage of the disorder of the Lebanese civil war, the PLO continued its attacks, prompting Israel in 1982 to launch a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to permanently remove the PLO.

The 1982 war resulted in a Israeli military occupation of southern Lebanon with no settlements until 1985, when the IDF withdrew to a smaller "security zone" along its border with Lebanon, which was eventually abandoned by Prime Minister Ehud Barack in 2000. Which is when Hizbullah -- a radical Shia group created and funded by Iran -- took control. It now uses the area as a base of operations against Israel, Christians, Druze, and Sunni Arabs on behalf of the Iranian government.

The Israeli war in Lebanon in 1982 was successful in meeting its goal -- it forced the PLO into exile in Tunis, far from the action.

Soon after, the first intifadah started, encouraged by a motley crew of local PLO militants, various other actors and a new, deeply religious group, Hamas, in a bid to "shake off" Israeli control of territories it had captured from Egypt and Jordan in 1967. Hamas was a new group formed in 1987 that sees itself as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- a theocratic radical Sunni group started in Egypt. Some articles claim that Israel played a role in Hamas' creation as a wedge against Fatah, but it seems unlikely considering that Hamas has an even bleaker view of Jewish sovereignty than Fatah, and for Israel's reliance on a secular Egypt as its southern neighbor. If there was any collaboration between Israel and Hamas, it must have been tactical and short-lived.

The intifadah was rag tag and chaotic for both the Israelis seeking military control of the territories, and the Palestinian fighters seeking to dislodge it and take over Israel. During this intifadah most of world opinion in the Western countries and movements began to shift away from Israel, perhaps due to the Hizbollah terror attacks on US Marines in Lebanon in 1983 which horrified Americans and caused us to withdraw our troops until the Gulf War, perhaps out of sympathy for a struggle that looked familiar to race-guilty Americans, who came to associate Palestinians with blacks and Jews with whites in the civil rights movement. And perhaps when Europeans began to see themselves as less guilty for the Holocaust since the Jewish State was using military force to suppress a nearby population. The thinking goes that by castigating Israel for supposed war crimes, Europeans exonerated their sins.

Ironically, it was Israel -- now faring more and more poorly in world opinion due to the long intifadah -- who invited the Fatah leadership back to the West Bank in what became the Oslo negotiations in 1994, to both end the intifadah and to come to some kind of bi- or multilateral peace settlement that was hoped to transform an entire region marked by ecnomic stagnation, ignorance and a rising ideological fanatacism. At least, this is what the world leaders and commentators and the Left were purporting. This restored Arafat's Fatah movement to the West Bank after many decades of exile.

During the mid-to-late 1990s Fatah/PLO cemented its leadership in the West Bank (which represents roughly 50% of the British Mandate if you exclude the mostly uninhabitable Negev desert) and Hamas made huge in-roads to the much more religiously minded Gazan clans. Israel debated interally whether or not it wanted to go through with the accords and a year after an orthodox extremist assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu rose to power, but over a divided country.

The biggest outcome of the Oslo negotiations was the transformation of the Fatah-led PLO -- hated by Israel, Shia Arabs, the Jordanians and Syrians -- into the much more benign sounding "Palestinian Authority" as a symbolic first step towards Palestinian statehood. Jordan also signed a public peace treaty with Israel, but the two countries had been at peace in private for decades because the Jordanian government needs a strong Israel to keep it from being taken over by Islamic radicals or political terrorists, like the PLO attacks way back in the late '60s. It's an ironic reversal from Jordan's anti-Jewish belligerence since 1948, but that's par for the course in the shifting alliances of a post-colonial Middle East. 

Despite internal arguments in Israel, most seemed to believe that a peace deal was within grasp between the State of Israel and Fatah/PLO/PA. I was there in August 2000 and can attest to the sentiment by various religious, liberal secular and many, many center-right Israelis. It seemed to be a fait accompli, but, in the fall of 2000, Arafat voided the final rounds of Oslo-inspired negotiations with Bill Clinton and then PM Ehud Barack by launching a new intifadah. Arafat called it the Al Aqsa Intifadah, pegged to the news story of famed general and politician Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but more directly related to the collapsed peace talks which Clinton publicly blamed on Arafat, who had become a close political partner and most frequent foreign guest of the White House.

There is still no bi-lateral settlement with Fatah, but in-coming President Barack Obama will undoubtedly push for Israel to sign a peace treaty. With who is anyone's guess. The current Fatah leadership lacks Arafat's leadership qualities.

Fatah, the majority faction within the Palestinian Authority, orchestrated the second intifadah in 2000 in part to push the Israelis towards greater territorial concessions, in part to restore its credibility in an increasingly religious Islamic world that decried its partnership with America and Israel.

After suffering through three years of constant suicide attacks, Israel eventually fought back in a massive military operation in 2003. This destroyed Fatah/PLO/PA governing infrastructure, reversed much of the Oslo negotiated military withdrawals from huge sectors of the territory, and began the creation of a huge security fence to thwart suicide attackers from the massive boundary between Israel proper and the West Bank. (The New York Times and other media associations call this the "pre-1967 border" but what they mean to say is the "1949 armistice" line between Israel and Jordan.)

By then any goodwill the PA had had in America was now spent, especially when intelligence revealed that Fatah had stolen most of their international aid money, rigged elections to stay in power, and supported suicide attacks against Israeli (and invariably American) civilians in gruesome competition with their Hamas rivals. Clinton, was out, Bush was in, and no one in American mainstream politics trusted Fatah. After 9/11, plans for peace grew even dimmer. And then Arafat died, leaving Fatah without its charismatic founder.

Israel decided that if it couldn't have a bi-lateral negotiation with a now compromised Fatah that had spent its last political credit with the second intifadah , then it would unilaterally withdraw from the territories and wipe its hands clean. World opinion favored this move as a postive gesture to a mostly leaderless Palestinian society.

The first step would be to leave Gaza because it's further from Israeli population centers, had fewer settlers, and less Jewish and Christian religious associations, than say, Jericho or Hebron do in the West Bank. The step after would be to leave most of the West Bank except for settlements on the outskirts of Jerusalem. To accomplish this Ariel Sharon founded a new political party, won elections and in 2005 he left Gaza. The Israeli perspective was to wait and see what would happen there. If Gazans were peaceful, then the West Bank would be next.

Hamas won them, and for the first time ever Fatah was in a new, untenable position -- it may lose power over the Palestinian movement it had created and controlled for over fifty years. And it would lose it to Hamas, in elections brokered by the Americans. The difficult of the situation, never mind the irony, created a civil war for the first time within the Palestinian movement, and in the end, Hamas seized control of Gaza and Fatah was left with the West Bank. Hamas rocket fire into Israel began in 2005, before Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, but after the group's complete takeover of the security apparatus in Gaza, the rocket fire intensified until the six-month, Egypt-brokered ceasefire of 2007. (For information on what transpired during that ceasefire, see here.)

At this time of writing, during the Israel-Gaza war of 2009, Israel wants to cripple Hamas and to install Fatah, Israel's former foe, to rule Gaza in yet another strange reversal in Middle Eastern history. This, then, would be the second time Israel will have sponsored Fatah's revival and control over a rudderless population. Critics of Palestinian sovereignty point out that to become a state one needs contiguous land, visionary leaders and internal cohesion among the populace. Currently the Palestinians have none of the above. 

It's hard to imagine how an incoming Democratic administration will change any of these facts since Hamas is a theocractic nightmare which counts Iran as its friend, Fatah is a diminished kleptocracy and the Israeli population will pull to the Right in the next round of parlimentary elections after feeling that the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake.

I have to hand it to you guys: you’re nothing if not inventive. The latest wheeze dreamed up by the Jews in their relentless quest for world domination is, it seems, the humble coffee bean.

Radical leftists and Islamists (we really must find an umbrella term that saves me typing all that out every time, so closely do they self-identify these days) are busily spreading the rumour that the Israeli assault on Gaza is being bankrolled by Starbucks, who have apparently donated all their profits this past two weeks to the Zionist war effort. For further details, over to our old chum Yusuf Al-Qaradawi:

“They used to hand a sign on the doors of their shops: ‘We benefit our most important partner, which is Israel, we help in the education of students in Israel, we help build up the Israeli defense arsenal,’ and so on. People go and drink their expensive coffee. Instead of paying 2 riyals for a cup of coffee, they pay 20 riyals. This Starbucks is Zionist. Why do we not teach the nation to make do with its own products, when possible, even if they are of lesser quality? This is the only way the nation will rise. My brothers, put the boycott against the nation’s enemies into action. Every riyal you pay turns into a bullet in the heart of your brothers in Gaza and in other Islamic countries.”

I’m sure I need hardly add that this is, er, grande crappucino. Starbucks has no special charitable or business links with Israel (indeed, it closed all its Israeli stores in 2003) and, as Snopes.com points out, the myth about Starbucks profits being used to fund the Israeli military comes from a spoof letter purporting to be from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, but actually penned by one Andrew Winkler and published on the ZioPedia website with a subsequent disclaimer clearly identifying it as parody. (Schultz himself is an avowed friend of Israel, which is no doubt how the story got started in the first place.)

Needless to say, satire is not the anti-war movement’s strong point. Several branches of Starbucks have been attacked in cities from Beirut to London and the chain forced to issue an official denial of this ludicrous story. But the fake Schultz memo sticks, like some ersatz internet version of the Protocols; websites republish the claims, Facebook groups pop up, and Starbucks is now semi-officially one of the financial props of the Zionist entity.

Nor is the damage restricted to overpriced coffee shops; British supermarket chain Marks and Spencer has also been targeted by demonstrators; ostensibly that’s because it stocks Israeli produce, like every other supermarket chain in Britain, but I wonder if it’s entirely coincidental that ‘Marks’ is one of this country’s more famously Jewish-founded businesses and a long-standing bugbear of anti-Semites throughout the Middle East. Indeed, if you tune into Iranian TV - and even Iranians watch the Superbowl - you will discover that there’s barely a large multinational anywhere that doesn’t siphon off profits to support the miracle on the Med. (Pepsi stands for “Pay Each Penny to Save Israel”, apparently, which I must admit sounds rather catchy.)

Of course, some might say that this is all rather handy, given those close links between the far left and the radical Islamist right; for your average member of the Socialist Workers Party, the only thing more satisfying than smashing a shopfront is surely the knowledge that you’re striking a blow for Palestine at the same time. But, deeper than that, as Brendan O’Neill points out at Spiked Online, it is arguably symptomatic of a wider malaise, what he calls a “cultural anti-Semitism” – “the projection of disillusionment with Western culture and values on to Israel, also known, in our politically illiterate times, as ‘the Jews’”.

How far that’s true I’m not sure; but it’s an interesting article and worth reading in full. In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than stopping off at Starbuck’s on your way home. Sure, it’s overpriced, but at least all those profits are being spent on shiny fighter planes.

Jeff Goldberg's insightful-as-usual op-ed the New York Times, while filled with informative anecdotal nuggets aplenty, could actually have been trimmed to consist of only the headline, "Why Israel Can't Make Peace With Hamas," and this: "A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks."  Boiling down the entire conflict isn't this simple, but boiling down Hamas is.  Either one believes that God transforms this or that group of people into zoo rabble or one does not.  One who does cannot be credited with having the faculties necessary to carry out negotiations meaningfully.  

To go one step further, the above formulation also answers those who would have us believe that the superstitious extremism of Hamas is so much rhetorical garnish on what is actually a material struggle for justice by people who would be more moderate if only they were treated better.  Suppose it is.  In that case, what would have to be admitted is that Hamas cynically utilizes the most abhorrently racist passages available to them in order to rouse the people into a righteous anger in the hopes it will beget insurrection.  In which case could one devoted to the cause of justice for the Palestinians endorse or defend such a group?  If the choice is between column a.) cartoonish ignorance, and column b.) calculated hate-peddling, why not choose column c.) neither?  

Again, this is why the Arab-Israeli conflict is so often misconstrued by those who portray it through the lenses of tolerance or sophisticated liberal theology.  Goldberg points out that what exists in the Gaza conflict is a hotbed of envy, sectarian schism, one-upsmanship and proxy influence.  If each of these is a fire burning out of control, taking seriously God's having turned Jews into pigs is but one of many (on both sides of the divide--remember there are raving messianic Jews as well) ideas that function like the equivalent of kerosene mixed with gasoline mixed with napalm jelly.   

Talking seriously about real solutions requires people on all sides to subscribe wholeheartedly to reality.  Who among us has seen a Jew turned into a swine, a sea divided for a fleeing tribe, or believes that any similar supernatural feat designed to favor one or another ethno-religio-cultural group took place?  The first prerequisite for negotiations should be that whomever is allowed at the table answers each of these in the negative.  Neither the disqualification of the likes of Nizar Rayyan from the proceedings, nor the skepticism of his ilk, should sadden anyone.

As the war goes on in Gaza, heightened tensions are sparking increased anti-Semitic threats and attacks around the world. Here are some that made headlines:

Anti-Semitism Spikes in Britain

According to TotallyJewish.com, eighty five individual incidents or threats have been reported against Jews and/or Jewish institutions in Britain in just the first two weeks of January, setting the nation on a path to having the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in one month in the history of the Community Security Trust's records. 

Synagogue in France Vandalized

A synagogue in northern France was vandalized on Tuesday with graffiti that included a swastika, according to the Jerusalem Post. Ynet also reports 55 incidents of anti-Semitism since the beginning of Operation Cast Lead.

Vandalism of Hebrew Girls School in Brooklyn

Jewkey.com reported the vandalism of Shaare Torah, a Hebrew Girls School in Brooklyn with "Kill the Jews" graffiti and swastikas. 

Israel Advocacy Group Raided by Pro-Palestinian Protestors

London's BICOM was raided on Tuesday morning by shouting protestors who super-glued photographs of Gaza victims to computers, doing damage to much of the office's communication infrastructure, according to TotallyJewish.com.

Policemen Stoned in Jerusalem

The Jerusalem Post reported that four policemen suffered minor injuries after being stoned by Arab teenagers in east Jerusalem on Wednesday. 

Turkey-Israeli Relations Strained

MSNBC reports strained relations between Israel and Turkey, once its closest friend in the Muslim world. The prime minister of Turkey is under pressure to take a stance on the war as it continues to be fought in Gaza.

J-Post reports:

A whopping 94% of the public support or strongly support the operation while 92% think it benefits Israel's security, according to the Tel Aviv University survey.

The poll found that 92% of Israeli Jews justify the air force's attacks in Gaza despite the suffering of the civilian population in the Strip and the damage they cause to infrastructure. 

80% oppose a cease-fire with Hamas that doesn't include the release of Gilad Schalit. Meanwhile:

A total of 85% of Israeli Arabs oppose the operation, the survey finds, while 80% say Israel should sign a cease-fire agreement even if it does not entail the freeing of Gilad Schalit. 

This may have really been a "war of no choice," however I am completely convinced that the policies implemented over the past years have led us directly to the point where we perhaps had no choice.

In 1995 a senior member of the Palestinian police force in Gaza with the rank of brigadier-general who was working in the office of the military liaison between the IDF and the Palestinian police invited me to visit him in Gaza. A.H. was one of the first Palestinian security personnel to arrive in Gaza after Oslo. He had lived most of his life outside of Palestine and for years was a fighter in the Palestinian Liberation Army, first in Jordan and later in Lebanon. As a military man, he took an instant liking to the IDF officers that he met in the early days of the preparations for the PLO takeover of Gaza and he befriended many of them.

I spent a full day with A.H. -- much of the time sitting in the back of his jeep being escorted around Gaza and under the protection of his guards sitting in two other jeeps with their Kalashnikov rifles. It was quite a bizarre feeling riding all over Gaza under the protection of PLO fighters.

At the end of the day, sitting in the salon of his home which was also his headquarters, he said to me: "I have something secret to tell you and I ask that you pass this information on directly to prime minister Rabin." A.H. knew that I was serving as an adviser to the peace team within the Prime Minister's Office. The information that he wanted me to pass on was that there were 35 tunnels underneath Rafah which were being used for smuggling weapons, drugs and other normal commodities. "Why are you telling me this?" I asked him. He answered: "Because my hands are tied. I cannot do anything about this, but if it is not dealt with, it will explode in our faces." How right he was. I passed the information along to the appropriate authorities. To the best of my knowledge, nothing was done.

The way that governments over the years have dealt with the Palestinian issue is not different than the way that our governments deal with any other strategic issue. We are always in the midst of a crisis. Our governments deal with crisis situations usually when it is too late to make an intelligently planned strategic change. Our governments are always "putting out fires" and only rarely invest the time and resources to develop a vision and long-term plans for reaching that vision.

The current water crisis is just one example. The State Comptroller's Office is conducting another investigation; its conclusions will be that the roots of the crisis and the urgency stem from not only poor management and bureaucracy but also from a lack of real strategic planning and vision.

Energy policies are another example. Why is it that some 20 years ago the country was in the forefront of solar technology with most homes heating water with solar panels, yet today we sadly find ourselves at the bottom of the list of Western states in the application of solar energy for producing electricity? It is not because we don't have enough sun. Denmark is already producing more than 20 percent of its energy needs from renewable energy sources, and in far away Scandinavia there is not even a fraction of the sunlight that we enjoy.

Our relations with the Palestinians are certainly dialectic. What one side does effects what the other sides does. There is no doubt that the Palestinians have a great deal of direct responsibility for continuous spiraling downward and the growing distance from real peace for both sides. Nonetheless, there must also be the recognition that Israel is clearly the more powerful of the two sides. It is a recognized state with a strong economy, a powerful military, a very developed legal system, real state mechanisms of governance, a vibrant democracy and an incredible amount of creative, intelligent and highly motivated human resources. In the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, Israel is the occupier and Palestine is the occupied. There is no symmetry in the balance of assets under negotiation or in the ability of Israel to dictate the terms of agreements. There is absolutely no balance of power.

Many Israelis argue that we are the only ones who give, the Palestinians are always taking and it's never enough for them. Palestinians have no capability to even understand that argument. From their perspective, they compromised on giving up 78% of the land between the Jordan River and the sea. They entered the Oslo process understanding that they would be able to create their state in the remaining 22%; they did not know that they would be required to negotiate on what remained.

Except for a very short period during the Rabin era after Oslo, the Palestinians have never believed that Israel was really ready for peace. The continuation of building and expanding settlements and bypass roads for settlers confirms for Palestinians that there never was an intention to withdraw from the West Bank. How could they understand anything different? Both at the public level and at the level of policy planning, no answer was ever provided for the contradiction between settlement expansion and future withdrawal.

As early as the 1970s Israel adopted a policy of supporting, licensing and facilitating the work of the Islamic Associations in Gaza headed by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as a counterbalance to the activities and organizations of the PLO. When the same Islamic Associations gave birth to Hamas, "experts" on Palestinian affairs were caught off guard. When Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza at the same time that prime minister Ariel Sharon humiliated President Mahmoud Abbas declaring that he was "a chick with no feathers" and repeating over and over again that there was no partner, the country was once again caught off guard when Hamas claimed victory for expelling the Zionist military and settlers. With victory in its hands, Hamas proceeded to elections and captured a majority in the parliament. When Abbas begged not to hold the elections, having a pretty good sense of the possible outcome, US and Israeli officials demanded that they be held, without considering what would happen if Hamas were to win.

I have been intimately engaged in this process for the past 20 years. I deeply believe that there has been almost no systematic long-term strategic planning as regards how we envision our relations with the Palestinians. Instead, we move from crisis to crisis. Even now, with all of the strategic planning that went to preparing for this war, there seems to be no real thinking about the day after.

It is not only the lack of an "exit strategy," a term that everyone learned to spew out after the US failures in Iraq, but also and perhaps even more important, a coherent plan for what is supposed to happen in Gaza when this war is over. So when this war does finally end, we will once again find ourselves in a new crisis and once again, we will not make any long-term plans on how we will one day live in peace with our neighbors.

This essay originally ran in the Jerusalem Post Online. It is reprinted here with Mr. Baskin's permission.

Is Israel committing war crimes in Gaza?  Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights thinks it probably is. So do the International Committee of the Red Cross and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

I'm going to examine, as dispassionately as I can, how the fighting between Israel and Hamas -- and its extremely high non-combatant casualty rate -- fits into the ever-evolving field of international humanitarian law and the jurisprudence governing war crimes. It's important to note that not all breaches of international humanitarian law are war crimes: shouting at a POW or refusing POWs food and water, for example, is illegal but is not a war crime. War crimes usually demand intent to cause death or injury among non-combatants, actually causing death or injury, or such gross negligence in carrying out military operations that civilian causalities are inevitable. These are all grey areas, open to interpretation, but still some basic lines may be defined. 

Let's start with Israel. International law requires that military operations meet standards of proportionality. Is the attack self-defense or an act of aggression? Is the scope and scale of the military campaign proportionate to the threat? Israel has the right under international law to take military action in self-defense against Hamas, but the proportionality of the scope and scale of its campaign remains debatable. The high civilian casualty figures -- 920 Palestinians killed, including 292 children, according to Palestinian sources -- only add to this unease. There is also the crucial question of intent. Is Israel seeking merely to end the rocket attacks, which is legally justifiable, or aiming to completely destroy Hamas as an organization and political force, which is not. However, even if Israel plans to destroy Hamas' organization, this objective in itself is not a war crime.

Whether or not a war crime is committed is governed by the laws of war, which include  proportionality. Other key questions include how is the fighting conducted? How much care is being taken to minimize civilian casualties? Is there access to the wounded? Are prohibited weapons being used? The basic principles were set out in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which introduced rules about protection of civilians, and in the additional protocols of 1977, which further defines questions of military targeting. Israel has not ratified the 1977 protocols but its courts have recognized some of their key provisions as part of customary law.  

Only enemy fighters can be intentionally targeted, that is, those engaged in hostilities. These can include uniformed soldiers, but civilians may also be targeted if they take a direct part in hostilities. Israel apparently seeks to expand this definition. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Captain Benjamin Rutland told the BBC: "Our definition is that anyone who is involved with terrorism within Hamas is a valid target. This ranges from the strictly military institutions and includes the political institutions that provide the logistical funding and human resources for the terrorist arm." This is a significant broadening of the definition and ironically, partly mirrors the justification of Palestinian terrorist groups that attacks on Israeli civilians are justified because all Israelis serve in the army, or will grow up to do so.

Three incidents in particular give cause for concern that Israel has breached international humanitarian law and/or committed potential war crimes. The first was the killing of numerous Hamas police officers at a passing out parade in Gaza city in the first wave of bombing. These policemen were part of Hamas's political and civil infrastructure, certainly, but were not engaged in combat at the time and were not obviously involved in organizing or carrying out attacks against Israel, and that is the crucial point.  If the police were regularly engaged in attacking Israel then arguably they could be a legitimate target, even while on parade. But most press reports say that the Hamas police were used for traffic control and internal security.

The second incident was the bombing of the Fakhura school, run by the UN, in Jabaliyah refugee camp. Civilians are increasingly seeking shelter in UN buildings, the GPS co-ordinates of which are given by the UN to the IDF. About 40 Palestinian civilians were killed when an Israeli mortar hit the school. The IDF claimed that Hamas militants fired from near the school. It responded with three mortars. Two hit their targets, the third missed by thirty meters and hit the school, causing terrible carnage. Israeli troops are allowed to fire back at Hamas, but are obliged to ensure that harm to nearby civilians is not disproportionate. If there is a high risk that the attack would cause disproportionate harm to nearby civilians they are obliged to hold their fire. Again, the degree of risk is a matter of interpretation. Accidentally hitting a nearby school while engaged in actual combat with the enemy in that vicinity would be unlikely to classed as a war crime as the law allows for some degree of confusion and error.

The third incident took place in Zeitoun, a district of Gaza city, where, according to survivors' reports, Israeli soldiers ordered about 100 members of the Samouni clan into a single home one night. Early the next morning Israeli troops repeatedly shelled the house, killing and wounding dozens. Some managed to flee, carrying the wounded and the dying. However, according to the Red Cross, Israel only allowed its medics to enter the house on Wednesday, where they found a chilling scene: four weak and distraught toddlers, clinging to the bodies of their mothers. According to the Red Cross: "the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded." Israel said it was waiting for the Red Cross to present its evidence.

As for Hamas, firing rockets randomly at population centers such as Sderot and Ashkelon is a war crime, say legal experts. The missiles are an indiscriminate attack on civilian areas and are not aimed at military targets. Israeli officials claim that Hamas is using "human shields" and firing from behind children sheltering in schools. It may well be that Hamas deliberately fires from schools and hospitals so as to draw incoming Israeli fire and boost civilian casualties, so helping Hamas win the propaganda war. Amnesty International accuses both Israel and Hamas of using "human shields" in the Gaza conflict.

If Israel or Hamas have carried out war crimes in Gaza what criminal sanctions are available under international law to punish those responsible? In a word: none. In these terms, this discussion is entirely academic. Even if Israeli forces carried out a deliberate massacre of civilians, there is next to zero chance that any Israeli army officer, official or politician would appear in the dock at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the permanent international legal authority that now deals with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Currently, only those countries that are State Parties to the ICC's 2002 Rome Statute fall under the ICC's jurisdiction. These 108 countries (out of 192 UN member states) do not include Israel or the United States. It's notable that despite the furious demands across the Arab and Muslim world for war crimes trials over Gaza, most Arab and Muslim countries, apart from Jordan, are also not party to the Rome Statute. Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia are all not party to the Rome Statute.

If a country is committing war crimes or crimes against humanity and is not party to the Rome Statute, such as Sudan, there are other options. The Sudanese government has, since spring 2003, been committing genocide in the Darfur region. Hundreds of thousands have died and more than two million have been displaced. The UN Security Council has referred Sudan to the ICC with a view to bringing charges against the country's leaders. The ICC judges are likely this month to decide whether or not to indict President Al-Bashir and others. However as the United States is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with the power of veto, it is unimaginable that it would approve such a request in relation to Israel. The same applies to the second option: setting up a special UN war crimes tribunal, as happened with Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. The United States would use its Security Council veto to prevent any such tribunal for Israel.

Hamas, as a non-state actor, is not party to the Rome Statute, and nor is the Palestinian Authority, which enjoys unique status as a non-voting member of the UN General Assembly. With regard to Hamas, the Security Council could follow the Sudan option of referring its leaders to the ICC or setting up a special tribunal to try them for war crimes.  However such tribunals usually have territorial jurisdiction and it would be politically impossible to only bring charges against one side of the conflict. (Indeed, when NATO bombed Kosovo in 1999 western leaders were alarmed to learn that they also fell under the jurisdiction of the UN War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia for their actions in the former Yugoslav province.) One option could be the growing use of extra-territorial national arrest warrants for crimes committed outside the country. For example, in 2005 Israeli Major-General Doron Almog was tipped off that British police officers planned to arrest him when he landed at Heathrow airport. He was accused of ordering more than 50 Palestinian homes to be demolished in the Gaza strip. He stayed on board his El-AL plane and flew back to Israel.

But for now, as far as international criminal justice is concerned, Israeli commanders may continue to make operational judgement calls that cause the incidental deaths of civilians, and Hamas may fire their missiles into Israel, with impunity.

With thanks to Anthony Dworkin at http://www.crimesofwar.org

Of all the countries caught up in the current wave of antisemitism, Turkey is arguably the greatest worry. While Turkey has traditionally been a reliable diplomatic ally and an even closer military partner of Israel, that hasn’t prevented a rash of antisemitic statements and demonstrations in the short period since the Gaza conflict began.

A number of people received the following email this morning. The writer, a Turkish Jew, has requested anonymity:

The Prime Minister in Turkey has encouraged hatred against Israel in his speeches which has become obvious anti-Semitic propaganda among the general public.

There are people around the clock besieging the Israeli consulate in Istanbul shouting their hatred against Israel and Jewish people. All around Istanbul billboards are full of propaganda posters against Israel like; “Moses, even this is not written in your book” and “Israel Stop this Crime.” On the streets the people are writing such graffiti as: “Kill Jews,” “Kill Israel,” “Israel should no longer exist in the Middle East,” and “Stop Israeli Massacre.”

The week-end before, some people wrote, “We will kill you” on the door of one of the biggest synagogues in Izmir resulted in the closing down of synagogues. Near Istanbul University, a group put a huge poster on the door of a shop owned by a Jew: “Do not buy from here, since this shop is owned by a Jew.” A group put posters on his wall saying that: “Jews and Armenians are not allowed but dogs are allowed.” Some young people are even threatening others with violence if they are seen as pro-Israel in social networking websites such as Facebook and Hi5.

The document attached is the official statement by the minister of education stating that tomorrow [January 13] at 11am in all the high schools and primary schools the students will pay homage to the women and children dead during the war and furthermore, the teachers of art will organize the session of painting and writing on the subject: “Humanity Drama in Palestine” and the winners will receive awards.

That astounding manipulation of children did take place this morning. The Turkish daily Hurriyet reports: “Turkish school students stood for a minute of silence at 11:00 a.m. (0900 GMT) in accordance with a direction issued by Education Minister Huseyin Celik. ‘This show of respect damns not only the cruelty in the Palestine, but also shows solidarity with the Palestinian people,’ the directive said.”

One has to wonder how that directive squares with this directive from the European Commission, the executive branch of the very same European Union in which Turkey seeks status as an ‘honorable member’: “Education should promote intercultural skills, democratic values, the respect of fundamental rights and the fight against discrimination, equipping all young people to interact positively with their peers from diverse backgrounds.”

The email continues:

The Jewish community can do nothing in response to what has been going on for the last few weeks, except giving vague statements that the Turkish Jewish Community does not want the war to be continued any more.

We have previously faced some strong reaction regarding previous operations in Gaza and the West Bank but this time is really different from former ones. I feel open anti-Semitism and hatred from all these people. Nobody understood, Even some widely read columnists in Turkey are writing things that lead all these groups toward this hatred becoming much more dangerous day by day.

But I know one thing: that the world should know about the widespread and openly anti-Semitic propaganda which far exceeds anything happening in Europe.

Ironically, as Yigal Schleifer reports, there is skepticism about the long-term impact of the Gaza crisis on Turkish-Israeli relations: “Experts say that mutual interests - particularly over regional security issues - will likely keep Turkey-Israel relations from rupturing. On the eve of the Gaza operation, which began Dec. 27, the two countries signed a $141 million deal in which Israel will provide the Turkish air force with airborne space imagery intelligence systems over the next four years.”

The real fear, as Schleifer says, concerns the well-being of the Jewish community which, as the above email indicates, feels directly targeted by the Gaza protests. Schleifer points out that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s shrill condemnations of Israel are partially fired by domestic concerns and he quotes respected columnist Sami Kohen thus:

“This is the first time that the public reaction has been so widespread. It’s very intensive this time. There haven’t been such widespread and spontaneous anti-Israel sentiments before. It’s not just the Islamic circles. It’s also the secularists and the nationalists. The protests have been representative of the whole of Turkish society.”

Indeed, if this Reuters report is accurate, Prime Minister Erdogan is now forgetting to substitute the word “Jewish” with “Zionist” or “Israeli”:

Erdogan said some media, which he did not name, were spreading false information about the Gaza offensive. “Excuses are found for mass killings of children at schools, hospitals and mosques, especially by Jewish-backed media,” Erdogan said.

No media outlet is free from continuous updates about the goings on in Gaza -- not even the social networking site, Facebook.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Dan Peguine, a resident of Tel Aviv, created the program "QassamCount" as a way to convey the real-time impact of rocket attacks on southern Israel. When he saw how many people were following his feed on Twitter within the first few days of its creation, he teamed up with Arik Fraimovich to create a version of the application for Facebook. The application automatically updates a subscriber's status with a live tally of the events in Gaza. Subscribers can choose between variable live updates or a daily digest that gives a summary of the day's attacks, both posted directly to their Facebook status. Peguine told the Post that the goal of the application is to help "bring to the world's attention the fact that Hamas fires rockets at Israel daily." Over 220,000 Facebook members have subscribed to the application as of this afternoon. And with over 200,000 reporting such statistics to their Facebook friends, there are hundreds of thousands more accessing the updates. QassamCount gets its information daily from ynet, NRG, and Haaretz.

In response to the high volume of subscribers to Peguine and Fraimovich's QassamCount application, Abdallah Ehab has created an application called "STOP Israel's War Crimes in Gaza," which has nearly 300,000 subscribers as of today. According to its description on the application's home page, it was formed as a "reply to some Zionist developers who developed Facebook applications that update subscribers' status periodically with the number of missiles launched by Palestinian resistance…to portray Israel as the victim who is defending itself and win the international compassion and support." The application takes its statistics from Al Jazeera and Al Arabia.

Facebook and Twitter aren't the only outlets online whose users are using the sites to raise awareness. The Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) is also utilizing sites like YouTube, with informational videos about the situation in Gaza that have had well over three-quarters of a million hits as of last week, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Watching NY1 last night, I noted an anchor referring to three "peaceful" rallies that took place in Germany over the weekend. One was in the city of Duisburg, and of its 10,000 or so attendees, a large number was pro-Hamas as opposed to antiwar. That rally can only be considered peaceful if you think that the act of German police officers entering a private residence to remove an Israeli flag from the window (the ralliers didn't like seeing it there) is peaceful:

"During the demonstration, which went through our street, the police broke into our flat and removed the flag of Israel," he wrote. "The statement of the police was to de-escalate the situation because many youth demonstrators were on the brink of breaking into our apartment house.

"Before this they threw snowballs, knives and stones against our windows and the complete building. We both were standing on the other side of the street and were shocked by seeing a police officer standing in our bedroom and opening the window to get the flag…. The police acquiesced in the demands of the mob."

Quite understandable, isn't it?  It's not as if the police have a responsibility to prevent rioters from breaking into a family's home, after all. That might lead to disproportionate responses and such. 

There was a YouTube depicting this scene, but it's been removed by the user who uploaded it.

Liberal Jews in Britain write to the Observer:

We are writing this letter as profound and passionate supporters of Israel. We look upon the increasing loss of life on both sides of the Gaza conflict with horror. We have no doubt that rocket attacks into southern Israel, by Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups, are war crimes against Israel. No sovereign state should, or would, tolerate continued attacks and the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Israel had a right to respond and we support the Israeli government's decision to make stopping the rocket attacks an urgent priority.

However, we believe that only negotiations can secure long-term security for Israel and the region.

We are concerned that rather than bringing security to Israel, a continued military offensive could strengthen extremists, destabilise the region and exacerbate tensions inside Israel with its one million Arab citizens. The offensive and the mounting civilian victims - like the Lebanon war in 2006 - also threaten to undermine international support for Israel.

We stand alongside the people of Israel and urge the government of Israel and the Palestinian people, with the assistance of the international community, to negotiate:

• An immediate and permanent ceasefire entailing an end to all rocket attacks and the complete and permanent lifting of the blockade of Gaza.

• International monitoring of the ceasefire agreement, including measures to ensure the security of the borders between Israel and Gaza as well as the prevention of weapons smuggling into Gaza.

It is our desire to see a durable solution for ordinary people and our view that an immediate ceasefire is not only a humanitarian necessity but also a strategic priority for the future security of Israelis, Palestinians and people of the region.

Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield
Sir Jeremy Beecham
Professor David Cesarani
Professor Shalom Lappin
Michael Mitzman
Baroness Julia Neuberger
Rabbi Danny Rich
Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein
Rabbi Dr Michael Shire
Sir Sigmund Sternberg
Paul Usiskin

Anthony H. Cordesman is one of the leading thinkers on military strategy in the US. Consequently, his views on the Gaza conflict will be taken seriously, even when they are found to be analytically suspect, as is the case with this article.

Cordesman savages the Israeli leadership for what he regards as their failure to articulate a grand strategic objective. “To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I,” he says, “lions seem to be led by donkeys.” (As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that Cordesman’s analogy will hardly endear him to those pushing the line about a genocide in Gaza; for them, Israelis are neither lions nor donkeys, but monsters to a man, woman and child.)

But back to Cordesman. It simply isn’t true that Israel hasn’t stated its objective. In essence, its aim is to humble Hamas psychologically and weaken it structurally: to decisively show the Islamists that they miscalculated horribly when they surmised that Israel would not substantively retaliate to intensified rocket attacks; to prevent them from rearming; and to achieve greater security in the south of the country (rocket attacks have decreased by 50 per cent since the operation began.)

True, it’s hard to foresee, in the immediate future, a complete end to the rocket attacks, but the Israeli leadership seems to understand that. “We are in midst of a struggle against terrorism, and it is not a one-time conflict,” Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has said. “This is not a conflict that will end with an agreement. We embarked on this campaign with the intent of achieving military goals and in order to clarify that we will not put up with this situation any longer. We set out to change the equation. Israel is responding with force, and considerable force at that.”

Cordesman, however, is drawing conclusions that are based more on political rather than straight military calculations. An old-school realist, he’s perturbed at the alienating effect which the Gaza operation is having on that strand of Arab opinion which is allied with US power and US dominance. By way of example, he cites the following:

One strong warning of the level of anger in the region comes from Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Prince Turki has been the Saudi ambassador in both London and Washington. He has always been a leading voice of moderation. For years he has been a supporter of the Saudi peace process and an advocate of Jewish-Christian-Islamic dialog. Few Arab voices deserve more to be taken seriously, and Prince Turki described the conflict as follows in a speech at the opening of the 6th Gulf Forum on January 6th, “The Bush administration has left you (with) a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza…Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza.” Neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces this reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world.

Does it really need to be restated that Arab leaders have always been given to these flights of rhetoric? It is the Palestinians, first and foremost, who will tell you that Arab leaders, particularly the princes and kings among them, are all talk and no action. Prince Turki’s righteous anger doesn’t change the strategic balance one jot. The Arab regimes fear Iran and Islamist radicalism much more than they fear Israel. Privately - and in the case of the Egyptians, not so privately - they are furious with Hamas for provoking this war. And frankly, the Arab states have never much cared for the Palestinians. With all the talk of Israeli “ethnic cleansing,” it’s easy to forget that Kuwait booted out more than 400,000 of its Palestinian population after the Gulf war of 1991 and that Qaddafi’s Libya expelled 30,000 Palestinians in 1995. So much for Arab unity.

Additionally, in his interpretation of Prince Turki’s remark, Cordesman falls into the orientalist trap, more commonly associated with the anti-imperialist left, of arguing that if someone who happens to be an Arab is also angry and despairing, then he is absolved of responsibility for his words. According to Cordesman’s logic, if Israel bombs, then Arabs are entitled to say and do whatever they want, and only Israel and the US are to blame for whatever grief follows. Nor does it seem to occur to him that if an apparently moderate leader can so easily start ranting about martyrdom, we must doubt whether he was really a “moderate” - whatever that may mean - in the first place.

Finally, in indulging Prince Turki’s outburst, Cordesman is buying into the widespread notion that what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to a total war - what the Nazi analogists would gleefully call a blitzkrieg. Again, that is not a point which can be conceded because it is a malicious falsehood. In actuality, there’s another long war that was reignited around the same time that the Gaza operation began - one that has claimed 70,000 lives over a twenty-five year period, in which 230,000 refugees are currently suffering horribly with little food or shelter - that gives a much better insight into how ugly armed conflict can be. But the solidarity activists aren’t going to demonstrate about it (most of them probably couldn’t find the country in question on a map) and the policy wonks will never assign it the same geostrategic significance as they do Gaza.

On Thursday, students from the Basij (people’s militia) handed a bouquet of flowers to the Venezuelan embassy in Tehran. This was in gratitude for the recent expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Caracas.

Iran’s leadership is furious about what is happening in Gaza. Iran’s population is also angry, but for a different reason.

In Iranian culture, supporting the underdog is a national characteristic. Iranians see themselves as a minority, so they try to relate. As a child, I specifically remember learning about Bobby Sands, an IRA prisoner who died in British prisons because he went on a hunger strike in protest. In Iran, the majority of people sided with the IRA. Not because they hate Britain, but because the Irish were the underdogs. The same feelings were demonstrated during the British invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Every single one of us in our classroom backed the Argentinians. Never mind the fact that the war was caused by Galtieri, the then-Argentine president who was a fascist with an alcohol problem. We simply did not know. There was the strong (Britain) and the weak (Argentina). The choice was easy and obvious.

So when it comes to Gazans, the Iranian people feel bad for Gazans because they see them as underdogs. One has to remember that Iranians lived through eight years of war started by Saddam Hussein, which led to the devastation of their country. Nobody came to help them and they see the same in Gaza. Does this mean that they want to eliminate Israel? The answer in the majority of cases is negative. This is against the wishes of hardliners in the Iranian government who would love to brainwash the people of Iran, especially the young through the use of TV programs, gory pictures of casualties in Gaza, and in some cases outright lies about what is happening there. But so far, apart from hardcore fundamentalists, they are not succeeding. The only thing which the majority of the people of Iran want eliminated is poverty and unemployment in their own country. Not some country 1,000 kilometers away called Israel.

The Iranian government has its own reasons for being angry. First and foremost the Israeli assault is a sign of Israel’s increasing military and diplomatic confidence. Iran’s hope was that after the 2006 war against Hezbollah, which many Iranian politicians saw as an outright victory, Israel would not undertake any more military operations against Iran’s allies, in fear of a massive Hezbollah retaliation.

However, this has not happened. The Israeli air force still flies into Lebanese airspace. And the 2006 war did not stop Jerusalem from bombing the nuclear site in Syria in 2007, as confirmed by foreign press. This is in addition to the assassination of high-profile Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in broad daylight in Damascus, which Iranians saw as an Israeli act. And now Israel has launched a massive military assault against Iran’s allies in Gaza. So where is the limit? When and where will Israel stop? If successful in Gaza, will the next stop be Iran’s nuclear facilities?

This is one of the reasons why the rocket attacks against Israel took place from Lebanon. Tehran, through Hezbollah’s Palestinian allies, wanted to tell the Israelis not to become too sure of themselves. That there is a limit to Iran’s patience. Despite Israel’s assault in Gaza and damages caused against Hamas’ military infrastructure, Iran wanted to say that Hezbollah still retains the option to act and it will be a costly one for Israel.

Another important factor for the Iranian government is the duration of the current conflict. One of the major worries for Tehran is that George Bush, who has two weeks to go before his presidential term ends, will allow Israel to launch an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The current conflict in Gaza serves Iranian interests because it is keeping Israel busy. Unless there is a major threat facing the leadership of Hamas, it is likely that Iran will want the conflict to continue until Barack Obama enters office on January 20.

Iran’s other hope is that the longer the conflict goes on, the more public support Israel will lose in the EU. There is a danger that this hope would materialize, due to increasing reports that Israel is not cooperating with the United Nations and the International Red Cross. The hardships which the civilian population of Gaza suffers also cause massive damage to Israel’s image and standing in Europe and Asia. Judging by reports and reactions in the international media, including American outlets such as the New York Times, Israel is not doing a good job to address such concerns.

There is also the question of the Israeli government not wanting to talk to Hamas because it does not want to legitimize the organization. This in the long term could backfire, especially if the conflict drags on because its participation could become essential in holding the organization accountable for its future actions. Last but not least, if Israel does not talk to Hamas, its allies such as the United States may. And this would be a major diplomatic victory for the Iranian government and Hamas.

One of the main goals of Israel’s invasion of Gaza is to weaken the hand of Iran. Crushing Hamas’ military infrastructure would bring security in the short to medium term. A long-term solution involves strengthening Palestinian moderates, especially the PLO.

What scares the government of Iran is peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israel should try its best to make this dream for the people of the world, and nightmare for the government of Iran, come true.