Gaza: another shameful day for Israel

Here’s Norweigan doctor Mads Gilbert, interviewed on the scene in Gaza by the BBC (I posted an earlier interview of his with CBS yesterday). According to Gilbert, Gaza's hospitals are completely overwhelmed with casualties, almost all of whom are civilians.

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Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford who served in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s, today delivers possibly the best analysis of Israel's assault on Gaza that I have seen so far, giving the essential factual background and context in which these events should be understood. If you read nothing else about what's been happening over the past two weeks, read this.

A quote:

"The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies."

"A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe."

"The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises."

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This morning the Guardian reports that, “Israel's assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.”

“The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.”

“Explaining its attack on al-Fahora school, the Israeli military claimed that a mortar was fired from the playground, and it responded with a single shell which killed known Hamas fighters; the resulting explosion was compounded because Hamas "booby-trapped the school". Two Hamas militants were among the dead, both part of a rocket-launching cell.”

As a former British intelligence analyst notes here, the Israeli military has a long history of lying about these sorts of incidents. But lets - for a moment - give them the entirely unearned benefit of the doubt and say their claims are right. What then? Well we can simply recall that – as Avi Shlaim notes in the article mentioned above (and more of this below) – the current round of violence started when, on 4 November, Israel decisively broke a ceasefire whose terms Hamas had basically adhered to but which Israel had not respected. Even the US media, some of the most dogmatically pro-Israel in the world, are being forced to accept this now.

The upshot? Israel is claiming is that it shelled these civilians in self-defence….in a conflict which it itself initiated. That is the absurd interpretation it is now trying to peddle. A less demented way of looking at it might be to say that the best method of self defence for Israel would have been not break the ceasefire in the first place. After all, there were zero Israeli deaths in the six months before the start of its all-out attack on Gaza on 27 December 2008, which by now has claimed over 600 Palestinian lives. Also, a great way of avoiding shelling civilians would be not to start a war to begin with (or, even then, to...er...just not shell civilians).

But that’s giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. In fact, John Ging, the director of operations of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, has said "I can tell you categorically that there was no militant activity in that school at the time of that tragedy...We have established beyond any doubt that the school was not being used by any militants...They were innocent people".

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Israel today began what it said will be a daily three hour ceasefire to allow Gazans to "get medical attention, get supplies... whatever they need". Wow, these guys are like saints, aren’t they? For every 21 hours of murdering innocent people there’ll now be 3 hours of not murdering innocent people, so the innocent people can get “whatever they need”, before they start getting murdered again.

Don't forget that Israel is defending Western civilisation against the barbarians, will you?

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Lets go back to that ceasefire that Israel broke. Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presents an important piece of empirical analysis in an article for The Huffington Post, showing that (a), yes, Hamas held the ceasefire and Israel broke it, and (b) that since the second intifada began eight years ago, the side that breaches periods of calm with new attacks has overwhelmingly been Israel. Not only that, but the longer the period of calm, the more likely it is that Israel will break it by launching a new attack, to the point where “it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week”.

“79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian… of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days”

Lets be clear about the importance of finding (b). In conflict situations, periods of peace provide something to build on; space for anger to subside, for dialogue to take place, even for levels of mutual trust to emerge. The longer a period of peace continues, the greater the chances of the cycle of violence being broken in a more substantive way. According to Kanwisher’s analysis, the greater the window of opportunity for peace that opens in this conflict, the greater the likelihood that Israel will slam that window shut, while it is hardly ever the Palestinians that do so.

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Finally today, a look at the longer term consequences of Israel’s aggression. The Guardian talks to “Gaza's leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, who has studied the effects of violence and trauma on children for 20 years, [and says that] about 65% of young people in the enclave suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

““There are many other traumatic symptoms, like headaches and abdominal pain and vomiting. There's an inability to concentrate, panic, anxiety, irritability," he said. "I've observed much change in the children. They are more anxious, more fearful. Children are panicky because of the explosions. Children want to leave. You hear it. They feel there is no hope, that the world can't do anything for them and they can't do anything for themselves."”

“Thabet says the impact of trauma on older children combines with other experiences to push them to extremes.”

“The perpetual killing has also drawn many children into the cult of the "martyr" and led them to expect an early death.”

“Thabet said the traumatizing of children was having a profound effect on Gaza's future. The children he studied in the early 1990s are now adults.”

“"They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatized children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community. You saw it in the factional fighting in Gaza in 2007," he said.”

“"So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behaviour. They will go to more extremes because they have no future. This is a problem. I've been warning people of this but nobody was listening. It's a cycle of aggression.””

“"Children see their parents killed in front of them. What do you expect?"”

Juan Cole, professor of Middle East History at the University of Michigan, has a good post on his blog today describing how previous Israeli atrocities have led to vicious terrorist reprisals. He notes that Israeli politicians are well aware that this will be one of the consequences of their actions.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, “predicted that the Israeli invasion of Gaza would see "extremists try to radicalise individuals for their own purposes". Research had shown "no single path" on the way to violent extremism, but foreign policy was certainly one factor, along with economic, social, and personal circumstances.”

So if it comes to light that Gordon Brown really has had our diplomats at the UN working in secret to block calls for a ceasefire, then not only will he have been assisting in the slaughter of innocent people in Gaza, he will also be responsible for creating what are known to be the conditions for an increased likelihood of deadly terrorist attacks in the UK. (In this regard, it seems Brown’s odious predecessor has also been busy recently)