This is the Israeli Military Calling: Civilizing War Has Failed

By David Swanson

[P]robably the biggest news story of 1928 was the war-making nations of the world coming together on August 27th and legally outlawing war. It’s a story that’s not told in our history books, but it’s not secret CIA history. There was no CIA. There was virtually no weapons industry as we know it. There weren’t two political parties in the United States uniting in support of war after war. In fact, the four biggest political parties in the United States all backed abolishing war.

Cue whining, polysyllabic screech: “But it didn’t wooooooooork!”

I wouldn’t be bothering with it if it had. In its defense, the Kellogg-Briand Pact (look it up or read my book) was used to prosecute the makers of war on the losing sides following World War II (an historic first), and — for whatever combination of reasons (nukes? enlightenment? luck?) — the armed nations of the world have not waged war on each other since, preferring to slaughter the world’s poor instead. Significant compliance following the very first prosecution is a record that almost no other law can claim.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact has two chief values, as I see it. First, it’s the law of the land in 85 nations including the United States, and it bans all war-making. For those who claim that the U.S. Constitution sanctions or requires wars regardless of treaty obligations, the Peace Pact is no more relevant than the U.N. Charter or the Geneva Conventions or the Anti-Torture Convention or any other treaty. But for those who read the laws as they are written, beginning to comply with the Kellogg-Briand Pact makes far more sense than legalizing drone murders or torture or bribery or corporate personhood or imprisonment without trial or any of the other lovely practices we’ve been “legalizing” on the flimsiest of legal arguments. I’m not against new national or international laws against war; ban it 1,000 times, by all means, if there’s the slightest chance that one of them will stick. But there is, for what it’s worth, already a law on the books if we care to acknowledge it.

Second, the movement that created the Pact of Paris grew out of a widespread mainstream international understanding that war must be abolished, as slavery and blood feuds and duelling and other institutions were being abolished. While advocates of outlawing war believed other steps would be required: a change in the culture, demilitarization, the establishment of international authorities and nonviolent forms of conflict resolution, prosecutions and targeted sanctions against war-makers; while most believed this would be the work of generations; while the forces leading toward World War II were understood and protested against for decades; the explicit and successful intention was to make a start of it by outlawing and formally renouncing and rendering illegitimate all war, not aggressive war or unsanctioned war or inappropriate war, but war.

In the never-ending aftermath of World War II, the U.N. Charter has formalized and popularized a very different conception of war’s legality. I’ve just interviewed Ben Ferencz, aged 94, the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, for an upcoming edition of Talk Nation Radio. He describes the Nuremberg prosecutions as happening under the framework of the U.N. Charter, or something identical to it, despite the chronological problem. He believes that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegal. But he claims not to know whether the U.S. invasion and ongoing over-12-year war on Afghanistan is legal or not. Why? Not because it fits either of the two gaping loopholes opened up by the U.N. Charter, that is: not because it is U.N.-authorized or defensive, but — as far as I can make out — just because those loopholes exist and therefore wars might be legal and it’s unpleasant to acknowledge that the wars waged by one’s own nation are not.

Of course, plenty of people thought more or less like that in the 1920s and 1930s, but plenty of people also did not. In the era of the United Nations, NATO, the CIA, and Lockheed Martin we have seen steady progress in the doomed attempt, not to eliminate war, but to civilize it. The United States leads the way in arming the rest of the world, maintaining a military presence in most of the world, and launching wars. Western allies and nations armed, free-of-charge, by the United States, including Israel, advance war-making and war-civilizing, not war-abolition. The notion that war can be eliminated using the tool of war, making war on war-makers in order to teach them not to make war, has had a far longer run than the Kellogg-Briand Pact had prior to its supposed failure and the Truman Administration’s remaking of the U.S. government into a permanent war machine in the cause of progress.

Civilizing war for the benefit of the world has been an abysmal failure. We now have wars launched on unarmed defenseless people thousands of miles away in the name of “defense.” We now have wars depicted as U.N.-authorized because the U.N. once passed a resolution related to the nation being destroyed. And just seconds before the Israeli military blows up your house in Gaza, they ring you up on the telephone to give you a proper warning.

I remember a comedy sketch from Steve Martin mocking the phony politeness of Los Angeles: a line of people waited their turn to withdraw cash from a bank machine, while a line of armed robbers waited their turn in a separate line to politely ask for and steal each person’s money. War is past the point of such parody. There is no space left for satire. Governments are phoning families to tell them they’re about to be slaughtered, and then bombing the shelters they flee to if they manage to flee.

Is mass-murder acceptable if done without rape or torture or excessive targeting of children or the use of particular types of chemical weapons, as long as the victims are telephoned first or the murderers are associated with a group of people harmed by war several decades back?

Here’s a new initiative that says No, the abolition of the greatest evil needs a renaissance and completion: WorldBeyondWar.org.

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David Swanson wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

This email may be unlawfully collected, held, and read by the NSA which violates our freedoms using the justification of immoral, illegal wars absurdly described as being somehow for freedom.

Another Eruption in Israel’s Permanent Colonial War on Palestinians

OpEds

If you see a picture like this, you can bet your last dollar it is a Palestinian child and not an Israeli infant. The balance of forces almost guarantees it.

“You need an event along the scale of the current event in order for you to be able to go in. After all, had we gone into Gaza three months ago, out of the blue, everyone would have said: Why are you entering Gaza?”Israeli finance minister, Yair Lapid, July 19, 2014 [1]

By Stephen Gowans

[T]he most recent eruption of Israeli military aggression against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, and the Palestinians’ consequent retaliation, is part of a permanent war of Zionist aggression against Arabs in Palestine that began soon after the UN promulgated its partition plan for Palestine on November 29, 1947. Formulated over the vehement objections of the Arabs, the plan allocated 56 percent of Palestine to a Jewish state, though Jews made up only one-third of the population and owned only six percent of the land, and 42 percent of the land to the Arabs, who made up the majority.

By May 15, 1948, when Jewish settlers proclaimed the state of Israel, the Zionist colonial project, through war and ethnic cleansing, had placed four-fifths of Palestine in the hands of Jewish settlers, and created a refugee population of 700,000 Arabs, displaced to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and beyond. Today, the Palestinian exile and diaspora community stands at five million, many leading lives—66 years after the Nakba, or day of catastrophe— of forced idleness in teeming refugee camps. In 1967, Israel brought Gaza and the West Bank under its military control, at the same time conquering Syria’s Golan Heights and occupying Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula (since returned to Egypt in exchange for Cairo’s absorption into the US orbit and cooperation with Israel.)

The Palestinians who live within Israel—or occupied Palestine ’48, in the terminology of the Palestinian resistance—have formal rights, but live de facto existences as second class citizens, non-Jews in the Jewish state. Meanwhile, their co-nationals in Gaza and the West Bank, the divided one-fifth of Palestine that is supposed to become the Palestinian side of the two-state solution, lead stifled lives under the heel of the Israeli military. Gaza, the most densely populated territory on the planet, is an open-air prison, its population subjected to an ongoing siege. The West Bank, as Jerusalem, is a stage on which a drama is played out daily of creeping annexation, as Israeli settlements snake out into the remaining Palestinian land, enlarging the frontiers of the Jewish state. What’s left of Palestine, for the endlessly promised Palestinian state which never materializes, is about one-tenth of the land Palestinians began with, before Zionists launched their project of expelling the occupants to make way for Jewish settlers.

There are three days of infamy in the Palestinian calendar.

• November 2, 1917, when the British foreign secretary , Arthur Balfour, whose country had conquered Palestine from the decaying Ottoman Empire, promised the land of one people (the Arabs) to another (the Jews.)
• November 29, 1947, when the UN promulgated its partition plan, effectively denying Palestinians the right of self-determination, and promising the better and best parts of Palestine to a Jewish state.
• May 15, 1948, the Nakba, or proclamation of the state of Israel on four-fifths of Palestinian territory, more than even the indefensible UN partition plan had envisaged.

Nakba Day 2014 saw two Palestinian youths killed by Israeli soldiers while commemorating the anniversary of the catastrophe. Video footage captured the last moments of the life of 16 year-old Nadim Siam Abu Nuwara. Walking placidly, he suddenly falls to the ground, his life extinguished by an Israeli army bullet. [2] Unlike the abduction of three Israeli settler youths, to come only weeks later, this event was barely registered in the Western media.

Meanwhile, Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that governs Gaza, was abiding by a cease-fire agreed to with Israel which had held for 20 months. Hamas hadn’t fired a single rocket since the last Israeli army attack on the territory in November 2012, the eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense, which killed 167 Palestinians and left six Israelis dead, emblematic of the gross imbalance of casualties in Israeli-Palestinian confrontations. [3]

Hamas had agreed to a unity pact with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in April, after a seven year rift. Israel and its arms supplier the United States—Washington gives the settler state $3 billion in military aid yearly, more than it gives any other country—had reacted angrily to the accord, excoriating Abbas for forging a deal with Hamas. Tel Aviv and Washington oppose Hamas above all else because the resistance group—which blends religious, military, political and social welfare functions—refuses to recognize the Zionist dispossession of Palestinians as legitimate.

Whether Hamas is a terrorist organization—as it is demonized by Israel and Western governments— is a matter of definition. Washington arbitrarily excludes states from its own (and therefore mainstream) definition of terrorism, thereby sanitizing the Pentagon’s and CIA’s violence against non-combatants. No matter how many civilians the United States terrorizes through drone strikes, carpet bombing, “shock and awe”, threats of nuclear annihilation, assassinations and air wars, it cannot, by its own definition, be burdened with the label “terrorist”, since Washington conveniently deems terrorism to be the exclusive preserve of sub-state actors. But surely, what ought to matter in any definition of terrorism is not who uses violence, but the purpose for which violence is used (political change) and who it’s used against (non-combatants.) If we drop the arbitrary provision that terrorism is purely a phenomenon of sub-state actors, and define terrorism as political violence aimed at civilians, then, to be sure, Hamas is a terrorist organization. But so too are the states of Israel and the United States.

Were Palestinian resistance organizations to renounce violence, could they effectively resist the oppression of a racist, settler, colonial, occupation state and oppose the creeping annexation of the remaining Palestinian territory? How many could honestly say that the French Resistance ought to have renounced the use of violence against German occupation of French territory during WWII? Anyone who counselled this would have been justifiably accused of encouraging capitulation. The demand that Hamas renounce violence is no different. It is a demand that Hamas give up its resistance, accept the dispossession of the Palestinians, and endorse the denial of Palestinian self-determination.

Elaborating on this theme, As’ad AbuKhalil writes:

Acts of resistance against Nazi occupation in Europe (are) remembered with fondness and admiration and no one questions the methods even when innocent civilians were killed. Even in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, Americans refrain from questioning the methods in which collaborators were dealt with (necklacing, for those who remember). Yet, the Palestinians are asked…to achieve the impossible: to adhere to standards of combat that no armies and no liberation movements have ever adhered to. [4]

Referring to demands that Hamas refrain from operating inside populated areas, AbuKhalil rejoins: “This is like asking the members of the French resistance in WWII to live away from population centers and to concentrate in an open field to facilitate their elimination by [the] German air force.” [5]

Israel sanctimoniously places itself on a higher moral plane than Palestinian resistance groups, arguing that unlike its adversaries who fire missiles into civilian areas, Israeli attacks are never intended to harm non-combatants. That’s debatable. But even were it true that Israel intends no harm to civilians, the reality is that Israeli military operations have produced many times more civilian casualties than the Palestinian resistance ever has. If minimizing harm to civilians is valued, then we should be far more accepting of Hamas’s ‘terrorism’ than Israel’s allegedly international humanitarian law-compliant military campaigns.

The Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas has gone a long way to acceding to Western demands to live peacefully with his oppressor, carrying out what some would call a program of collaboration. The kindest description of Abbas’s conciliation with Zionism—he says Arabs should never have rejected the UN’s 1947 partition plan, [6] concedes that Palestinians have no claim to the greater part of Palestine occupied by Jewish settlers before 1967, [7] and would deny the right of Palestinians to return to the homes they were dispossessed of in what is now Israel [8]—is that it’s based on the belief that 10 percent of a loaf is better than none. But the so-called peace process—to which Abbas is committed— goes nowhere. It has, instead, turned out to be a delaying tactic used by Israel to devour more Palestinian territory through the construction of new settlements and expansion of existing ones.

Abbas’s unity pact with Hamas was a retaliatory strike at Israel’s play-acting at negotiating. But with one of the world’s largest militaries, Israel is hardly motivated to negotiate. Backed militarily and diplomatically by the world’s hegemonic power, Israel has overwhelming bargaining power. Why would it make even a millimeter’s breadth concession? Better, in the view of the settler state, to use its US-supplied military machine to crush resistance and advance its colonial-settler agenda.

Netanyahu kicked off his new campaign to squeeze Hamas—or “mow the grass”, an Israeli reference to regular offensives against Palestinian resistance—by cutting off the $100 million of monthly tax revenue it collects on the Authority’s behalf. [9]

Next, Tel Aviv ordered a June 11 airstrike on Gaza, violating the ceasefire, negotiated after the November 2012 Israeli assault on Gaza. Netanyahu said the airstrike was targeted at a Hamas police officer who had been involved in numerous rocket attacks against Israel. “This is the true face of Hamas,” thundered the Israeli prime minister. “It is continuing to plan terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens even as it is inside the Palestinian government.” [10]

To intensify pressure, Israel announced it would build 1,500 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, “saying it was retaliation for the creation of a Palestinian unity government with the militant group Hamas.” Israel’s housing minister Uri Ariel called the new construction—illegal under international law—”an appropriate Zionist response to the Palestinian terrorist government. I believe that these homes will be just the beginning.” [11]

On June 12, Israel was handed a pretext to further heighten its crackdown on Hamas. Three Israeli youths, Eyal Yifrach, 19, and two 16-year-olds, Naftali Frankel and Gilad Shaar, were abducted in the West Bank. Netanyahu immediately accused Hamas of kidnapping the teens. While Hamas welcomed the abductions, as did other Palestinian resistance organizations—on grounds that the youths could be used to bargain for the release of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails—it denied that it had carried out the abduction. That didn’t deter Netanyahu. Producing not a speck of evidence to substantiate his claim, the Israeli prime minister insisted Hamas was responsible. Netanyahu, it should be noted, has a long record of fabrication in the service of political goals. As a parliamentarian, the future prime minister announced with utmost certainty that Iran was only three to five years away from making a nuclear weapon. That was in 1991. [12] In 2002, Netanyahu testified before the US Congress that: “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons–no question whatsoever.” [13] And now there was no question whatsoever that Hamas had abducted the three teens. And yet, Israel has yet to arrest any suspects. [14]

The outcome of Israel’s military offensive was consistent with an operation to degrade Hamas more than it was a police operation to locate abductees. The Israelis abducted 640 Palestinians, including Hamas’s top West Bank leadership, but charged none of them with kidnapping the three youths. They re-arrested and re-sentenced 75 Palestinians previously released in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. They raided 1,000 homes, universities and other facilities, including 10 Hamas-run institutions. And they heaped punishment on Palestinian political prisoners, subjecting them to extra cruelties, including cutting back on visits from their families. Additionally, they killed five Palestinians, and imposed restrictions on Palestinian exit from the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza, at the same time limiting travel around Hebron. [15] Israeli Brigadier General Moti Almoz explained on July 8 that: “We have been instructed by the political echelon to hit Hamas hard.” [16]

But hitting Hamas hard also meant hitting the broader population hard, that is, collective punishment. This was a reality the Israeli army acknowledged, and welcomed. A senior Israeli army commander told the Wall Street Journal:

There is a dilemma of how much pressure to put on the terrorists themselves and how much to put on the population. I think the Palestinians understand the situation: Someone did something outside the rules of the game. If there is kidnapping in Hebron, then they will suffer. [17]

This, by the way, meets the definition of terrorism considered above, namely, visiting misery on a civilian population to create pressure to bring about a desired political goal. It is the terrorism of the oppressor.

With Hamas’s senior West Bank leadership locked up in Israeli jails, the offensive now turned to Gaza, a Hamas stronghold. The impact has been devastating. From July 8 to July 21 [18]:

• 584 Gazans were killed;
• 3,650 were injured;
• More than 1,134 homes were completely or partially demolished;
• 67 mosques were completely or partially destroyed;
• Property damage was inflicted on:
o 14,500 homes;
o 81 schools;
o 5 health centers;
o 3 hospitals;
• 100,000 were displaced;
• 900,000 were affected by the destruction of electricity, water and waste water infrastructure.

Over the same period 25 Israeli soldiers were killed and two Israeli civilians died by rocket and mortar fire. [19] The destruction continues.

US and Israeli political figures justified the carnage by pointing to Palestinian rocket attacks. Defending the Israeli massacre in Gaza, US president Barack Obama said “no nation should be subjected to a hail of rockets or underground incursions.” [20] He didn’t say that no nation should be subjected to 66 years of dispossession, abridgment of its rights, ethnic cleansing, repression, occupation, and racism.

Former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren said: “It’s very difficult to feel compassion for the other when you have rockets aimed at your family.” [21] He didn’t say it’s very difficult to feel compassion for the other when he has stolen your land and made you a refugee.

What’s the solution? It’s not two states. Palestinians don’t accept it, and nor should they. According to a survey conducted from June 15-17 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

• 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank believe that the Palestinian national goal for the next five years should be reclaiming all of historic Palestine or establishing one state in which Arabs and Jews have equal rights.
• Two-thirds believe that even if a two-state solution is successfully negotiated that efforts should continue to liberate all of historic Palestine from Zionist control. [22]

Officials of the settler state know that Palestinians will never accept the permanent colonial war against them and accordingly count on Abbas and other Palestinian conciliators to accept crumbs from the Zionist feast on Palestine and ride herd on Palestinians who object to the selling off of their rights. Abbas and company accept a two-state solution because they think it’s the only measure of independence that can be practicably secured. This, however, is unrealistic. First, Israel evinces no genuine interest in accepting even a tiny Palestinian state on a small fraction of the land Palestinians originally inhabited before the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Instead, Tel Aviv uses on-again-off-again negotiations over a two-state solution to gradually devour more of Palestine. Secondly, two states—a large, militarily powerful Jewish state occupying the better and best parts of Palestine dominating a tiny, fractured Palestinian state—will never mollify Palestinians and slake their thirst for justice. A resistance will continue, even if a Palestinian state is negotiated, as the polling data above indicate. No justice, no peace.

The solution–if it can be put that way, or inevitable outcome if it can be put another–is a single, secular, democratic state, in which all are accorded equal rights, regardless of religion or national origin—not a racist state, not a Jewish state, but a democratic one. This is a moral, just, and democratic alternative to the plague of a racist, settler, colonial ideology of dispossessing indigenous people, driving them into exile, denying them the right of return, and blocking their right of self-determination. The solution to Zionism is the same as the solution to fascism: its repudiation and conquest by democracy.

NOTES

[1] Anne Barnard and Jodi Rudoren, “Despite Israeli push in Gaza, Hamas fighters slip through tunnels”, The New York Times, July 19, 2014.
[2] Ramzy Baroud, “Israel awakens the Palestine it tried to crush”, The Palestine Chronicle, July 11, 2014.
[3] J.J. Goldberg, “How politics and lies triggered an unintended war in Gaza,” the Jewish Daily Forward, July 10, 2014.
[4] As’ad AbuKhalil, “Western standards of Palestinian justice,” Al Akhbar, July 22, 2014.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “Arab rejection of ’47 partition plan was error, Palestinian leader says”, The Associated Press, October 28, 2011.
[7] Joel Greenberg, “Israel’s Netanyahu cool to Abbas’s hint at waiving Palestinian ‘right of return’”, The Washington Post, November 4, 2012.
[8] Joshua Mitnick, “Abbas signals flexibility on Palestinian refugees”, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 16, 2014.
[9] Nicholas Casey, “Palestinian unity deal creates stir in Middle East”, The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2014.
[10] Isabel Kershner and Fares Akram, “Israeli airstrike in Gaza strip kills Palestinian”, The New York Times, June 11, 2014.
[11] Nicholas Casey, “Israel plans expanded settlement in retaliation for Palestinian government with Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2014.
[12] Scott Peterson, “Imminent Iran nuclear threat? A timeline of warnings since 1979, ”The Christian Science Monitor, November 8, 2011.
[13] Peter Hart, “Netanyahu can disinform on Iran just as well as Iraq,” FAIR, June 23, 2014.
[14] Nicolas Casey, Tamer El-Ghobashy and Joshua Mitnick, “Israel launches ground invasion of Gaza”, The Wall Street journal, July 18, 2014.
[16] J.J. Goldberg, “How politics and lies triggered an unintended war in Gaza,” The Jewish Daily Forward, July 10, 2014.
[17] Nicholas Casey, “Hebron bears brunt of Israel’s search for missing teenagers”, The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2014.

[20] Jodi Rudoren, “A push into Gaza, but the ground has shifted”, The New York Times, July 18, 2014.
[21] Jodi Rudoren, “In Gaza, epithets are fired and euphemisms give shelter,” The New York Times, July 20, 2014.
[22] http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/other/PalestinianPollingReport_June2014.pdf

Israel’s War of Attrition in Gaza

Thinly Veiled Code for Genocide

by ROB URIE, Counterpunch

[F]ollowing World War II U.S. General Curtis LeMay, the reported inspiration for the psychotic General Jack Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy Dr. Strangelove, was said to have remarked that had the Allies lost the war he would likely have been hanged as a war criminal for the bombing of Tokyo. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians perished under American bombs in a series of raids on the Japanese city. Separately, the Japanese leadership was widely reported to have been ready to surrender before atomic bombs were dropped on primarily civilian populations in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With this history it seems difficult to remember that upon entering World War I aerial bombardment of a civilian population was widely understood to be a war crime.

As it was applied to the U.S. war on Southeast Asia (Vietnam) the term ‘war of attrition’ was barely veiled code for a racist slaughter, the ‘kill ratio’ of 58,000 U.S. soldiers to 3,500,000 Vietnamese and likely millions more in Cambodia and Laos is evidence of a degree of military mismatch perhaps better called genocide. The theory behind the term is that causing an ‘appropriate’ level of death and destruction against one’s enemies produces two outcomes: it turns people against ‘their own’ governments causing a loss of internal political support for them and it kills so many potential adversaries that there is no ‘will’ (no one) left to fight. The dim socio-pathology of the U.S. strategy in Vietnam can be found in the utter implausibility of the largely agrarian-peasant population having any geopolitical ‘vision’ at all, let alone on the side of ‘their’ enemies for preceding millennia, the Chinese.

When Ronald Reagan launched his war of terror against the people of Nicaragua in the early 1980s the articulated view in his administration was that if U.S. / CIA proxies (Contras) murdered enough people and blew up enough bridges and schools those who had supported the Nicaraguan Revolution just a few years earlier would turn against the revolutionary government (FSLN). Events in Nicaragua came on the heels of the Iranian Revolution that saw the overthrow of the CIA / MI5 installed ‘Shah’ whose brutal ‘rule’ served as a front for Western expropriation of Iranian oil. In the name of ‘freedom’ the Contras carried out a campaign of terror against the people of Nicaragua that included torturing and murdering tens of thousands of civilians, including slaughtering entire villages. The strategy appeared to ‘work’ when in 1990 the terrorized population of Nicaragua voted out the Revolutionary government in favor of one more advantageous to U.S. ‘interests.’ However, once the murders and destruction ended the Sandanistas were voted back into power. Apparently state terrorism can create a stopping point but not an end.

‘War of attrition’ completes the shift from armies meeting on battlefields to kill and maim one another to the explicit targeting of civilian populations in wars of state terror. Historically, the specific targeting of civilian populations was ancillary and direct— before aerial bombardment and long-range missiles the capacity for modern technocratic slaughter from a ‘safe’ distance was limited. Fighter pilots in WWII faced real risk of death. By the time of the American war on South East Asia bomber pilots flew five miles high to release bombs that killed people they never had contact with. Likewise, the Israeli pilots bombing Gaza today do so from safe distances and can tell themselves that they are bombing ‘targets’ rather than human beings. Left unsaid is that killing and maiming a civilian population to affect a political outcome is the definition of terrorism. This is the ‘practical’ purpose of the Israeli ‘human shield’ charge against Hamas— to shift culpability for terrorist violence onto its (Israel’s) victims.

By the mid-2000s the improbable term ‘democratization’ was being tossed around as George W. Bush scrambled for a plausible justification of the U.S. war on Iraq in the absence of having found WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). In contrast to the reasonably inferred ‘planned chaos’ explanation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, a number of the neo-cons Mr. Bush surrounded himself with appeared so arrogant and dimly ideological that they believed the ‘democratization’ storyline.Mr. Bush was reported to have supported the elections in Gaza and he even ‘allowed’ Hamas to challenge Fatah in them. When Hamas won the election was quickly re-framed by Israel and the U.S. as a ‘coup.’ At the time the cognitive dissonance between Bush-Cheney-neo-con blather about ‘democracy’ and the near instantaneous collective punishment inflicted on the citizens of Gaza for acting ‘democratically’ seemed too conspicuous to be readily overcome. As history had it, the received distance in the West between ‘democracy’ and the slaughter of the captive Palestinian population to affect a political outcome is less than one might imagine.

The current storyline from Israel of ‘defensive’ aerial bombardment and ‘precision targeting’ in Gaza is met with the facts of Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system (built with the U.S.) that renders rockets fired from Gaza ineffectual, the hugely asymmetrical ‘kill ratio’ of Palestinians to Israelis slaughtered and the conspicuous targeting of civilian houses, schools, hospitals and critical infrastructure by Israel. Conversely, if Israel’s bombardment is precise and those killed are overwhelmingly civilians then civilians are the precise targets of Israeli bombs. Israel’s strategy is clearly a war of attrition: slaughter a captive civilian population to force repudiation of their democratically elected political representatives without addressing the circumstances that led to the choice of Hamas over more ‘palatable’ (to Israel) political leadership. The implicit choice from the election is that Palestinian capitulation to the Israeli siege and occupation is not an option.

The reason for keeping solid focus on the U.S. in what can be more narrowly explained as a regional (or even ‘internal’ if you assume away the history of Palestine) conflict is that Israel’s capacity to act as ‘it’ does toward the Palestinians and across the Middle East depends upon the might of the U.S. military to back it up. This is to grant that narrower explanations have descriptive power but to aggressively reject the eternal slander that opposition to Israel’s state policies derives from nationalist / religionist differences rather than as stated— objection to Israel’s state policies. The U.S. provides Israel with the arms, intelligence and military support that facilitate siege, occupation, irresolution of political difference and a hardening antipathy that is as socially destructive as it is unjust. And the history of the U.S. acting as dishonest broker in Israeli-Palestinian ‘negotiations’ (always on the side of Israel) combined with the use of Israel as regional proxy for U.S. ‘interests’ places the plight of the Palestinians in an international context. Without the U.S. (and Britain and France) in the picture negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians would proceed from a wholly different set of premises.

The relevance here of the U.S. ‘experience’ in Iran (1953 – 1979) is that installation of a puppet dictator (the ‘Shah’) was preferred to direct instigation of regional chaos. Likewise the U.S. (CIA) installed Saddam Hussein in Iraq until he was ‘uninstalled’ in the recent U.S. war. When considered with (George W) Bush’s catastrophe in Iraq and his apparent sincerely held, if only superficially considered, belief in the possibility of creating ‘democracy’ across the Middle East, it would seem that American stupidity and arrogance are at least as likely an explanation for widespread chaos as some well-conceived plot to prevent competing interests from arising (the theorized goal of planned chaos). This is no doubt a roundabout way of backing into the contention that in addition to being outright evil Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is shortsighted bordering on radically self-destructive. Tying Israel’s future to the Jeb Bush / Hillary Clinton / John McCain / Lindsey Graham school of foreign policy is certainly a nod in the direction of human folly.

The intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies with Israel and the U.S. If the goal of war of attrition is to affect a political outcome then that political outcome has to be possible or it isn’t an outcome, it is a slaughter. Today Nicaragua is relatively stable while other ‘beneficiaries’ of American ‘largesse’ in Central America— Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, are gangster states so violent and corrupt that their children are willing to risk being treated as criminals in the U.S. for the chance to live a little while longer. The Nicaraguan people waited for U.S. proxies to stop murdering them and then rejected direct American governance. The Palestinian people have no such option. The election of Hamas can only be seen as destructive to Palestinian interests if there was a better option. The Israeli and American view is that if siege and occupation don’t force fealty then adding slaughter and wholesale destruction will accomplish this goal. At this point Israel’s war of attrition against the Palestinian people is evident for what it has always been, thinly veiled code for racist genocide.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is forthcoming.

New Poll Reveals Sharp Generational Divide in Attitudes Towards Israeli Assault on Gaza

AlterNet [1] / By Janet Allon [2]

Yet another child killed in Gaza – Image By Quds News . An orphan of Western media attention.

[A] new Gallup poll has revealed some surprising results in American’s attitudes toward the current crisis in Gaza, and whether Israeli actions there are justified. One poll showed that Americans in general see Israel as much more justified in its use of violence than Hamas is. And the proportion of those who approve of Israel’s actions compared with those who do not is about the same as it was during the last major conflagration between Israel and the Palestinians 12 years ago. The polling organization surveyed about 1,000 Americans.

As Jeffrey Jones, who summarized the poll for Gallup, put it:

positive views of the Israelis than of the Palestinians [3].

The numbers are strikingly similar. On 2002, 44 percent of those polled said Israel’s actions were justified, and just 17 percent saw Palestinian actions as justified. This was before the rise of Hamas, and Palestinians were mostly resisting the occupation with suicide bombers. In 2014, 42 percent of Americans see Israel’s use of force as justified, while just 11 percent see those of Hamas (mostly rocket fire) as justified.

But there were big divides between the parties (65 percent of Republicans approve of Israel’s actions; while just 31 percent of Democrats do); between the genders (51 percent of men approved of Israel’s actions compared with 33 percent of women); and between the races. (50 percent of whites see Israel’s actions as justified compared with 25 percent of non-whites.)

Perhaps the biggest discrepancy was between the age groups. Put simply, the older you are, the more likely you are to approve of Israeli actions. Here’s how it breaks down:

Higher educational levels tended to mean more favorable views of Israel.

Gallup does not offer much interpretation of these numbers, and some will surely see evidence of Israel’s massive P.R. machine in the results.

Jones concludes:

Americans are generally pessimistic about the Israelis and Palestinians being able to settle their differences and live in peace [3], and while the escalated tensions between the two sides have been a major news story the last two weeks, the American public does not view it as any more serious than past conflicts.

The Gaza war crimes and the bankruptcy of nationalism

OpEds

By the wsws.org editorial board | 25 July 2014

[T]he Palestinian territory of Gaza is the scene of war crimes committed by the state of Israel that defy words. What is to be said about yesterday’s bombing by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of a UN-run school in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, which killed at least 15 people and inflicted terrible wounds on 200 more, overwhelmingly women and children? The IDF had been provided the coordinates of the facility and informed on numerous occasions that the area was occupied by large numbers of civilians seeking refuge from endless artillery and air strikes. The IDF shelled it regardless—the fourth time in a week that UN shelters have been targeted.

The bombing of the UN school is just the latest outrage. As well as schools, the IDF has attacked hospitals, water plants, sewage treatment plants, ambulances and journalists. The indiscriminate Israeli assassination attempts against leaders of the Islamist Hamas movement have murdered dozens of their family members. In just eight days, at least 800 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have been killed and over 5,250 injured.

The invasion of Gaza testifies to the depraved and bankrupt character of the Zionist regime in Israel. The government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu represents an isolated and demoralised ruling class that has lost its head and has no answer to the crisis it confronts except disorientated and homicidal outbursts of violence. This mass slaughter against a defenceless Palestinian population serves only to deepen the revulsion and hostility toward Zionism throughout the Middle East, around the world and among Jewish workers in Israel itself.

The US and European imperialist powers who defend Zionism are being no less discredited. Anger grows every time President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and European politicians repeat the contemptible justification for war crimes—“Israel has the right to defend itself”—while declaring their “concern” over civilian deaths. The Egyptian regime and the other Arab states throughout the Middle East that collaborate with Israel are despised by their populations because of it.

Two weeks of growing demonstrations and unrest in East Jerusalem and the West Bank portend the eruption of another intifada—a generalised uprising of the Palestinian masses—against both Netanyahu’s government and the venal Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas that has accommodated itself to every Israeli atrocity. More and more Israelis are revolted by their own government.

Outrage, condemnation and protests, however, are not a sufficient response. What is required is a political perspective that can unite the working class of all religious and ethnic backgrounds in a common struggle for socialist internationalism.

Sixty-six years after the establishment of Israel, and 47 years since the expansionist war of 1967 and the seizure of the Occupied Territories, the entire Zionist project—a reactionary perspective of carving out a sectarian Jewish capitalist state in the Middle East—has manifestly failed.

Decades of repression and killing have not broken the resistance of the Palestinian population who were originally dispossessed in 1948 and continuously by the spread of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Zionist ideology maintains that the dispossession of the Palestinians is justified by the Holocaust and the need to establish a safe haven for the Jewish people. Today, the Israeli government carries out crimes that more and more resemble those of the Nazis. The 1.8 million people in Gaza are imprisoned in a modern-day ghetto, enduring a hell on earth and deliberately deprived of clean drinking water, adequate food, electricity and health services in what can only be described as a genocidal policy.

The nationalist propaganda in Israel that the Zionist state represents all those of the Jewish faith cannot refute the reality that it is a capitalist society, divided by class and wracked by social antagonisms. The beneficiaries of Zionism are an oligarchy of capitalist billionaires and millionaires and a thoroughly corrupt political establishment. The richest 500 Israelis have tripled their wealth over the past 12 years, while the wages of workers have been slashed to maintain the competitiveness of Israeli corporations on the world market.

As in every country, Netanyahu’s government is directing a class war against the working class in response to the systemic global economic breakdown, imposing savage austerity cuts and tax hikes that impact most severely on the poor. The onslaught on Gaza is in large measure motivated by the desperation of the Israeli capitalist class to divert the insoluble crises of Israeli society into anti-Arab chauvinism and war against the Palestinian masses.

The situation in Israel and the Middle East, it must be understood, is just one manifestation of a broader crisis of the entire capitalist system. As in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, the division of the globe into rival national-states and the subordination of economic life to the accumulation of profits for a capitalist minority cannot be reconciled with the integrated and interdependent reality of the world economy. The globalisation of production over the past three decades has raised to a new intensity the inherent contradictions of capitalism that led to the world wars of 1914 and 1939.

The ruling classes of not only the United States but all the imperialist powers now view militarism and war as the only means to subordinate global resources and markets to their narrow national interests. The various propertied cliques in the artificial nation-states created by so-called de-colonialism are universally promoting sectarian or ethnic-based divisions to try to stake their claim to wealth and privilege against their rivals.

Amid carnage, civil war and imperialist intrigue in country after country, the International Committee of the Fourth International has warned in its resolution “Socialism and the Fight Against Imperialist War” of the growing dangers of a third world war. The same processes, however, are propelling the working class toward social revolution.

This tendency was powerfully seen in the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Had that revolution not been aborted, the situation in the Middle East would be very different from what it is today. The ability of the Egyptian ruling class, and the imperialist powers that stand behind it, to keep control underscores the central historical problem in the working class in the Middle East and internationally—the crisis of perspective and leadership.

It is this crisis that the WSWS and the ICFI are fighting each day to resolve, confident that events are creating the conditions for mass struggles against the capitalist class in every country.

Nowhere is the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for socialism as stark as in the Middle East. The solution to the catastrophe created by capitalism and the nation-state system is the abolition of both, through the establishment of the United Socialist States of the Middle East, as part of the fight for world socialist revolution.

The strategic task of the hour is the fight to build the new leadership of the working class and the oppressed masses.

—The WSWS International Editorial Board