Rethinking Economics (and other good reading material)

Here's some interesting stuff I've been reading over the last few days.

First, the economy. There are two good articles in today's Guardian on how to reassess our economic ideas in the wake of the financial crash and subsequent depression. Robert H Frank makes a few thought provoking observations on how economic policy can be informed by our understanding of how different elements of human nature and behavioural patters can affect market outcomes. In short, it turns out that the neo-Thatcherite/New Labour ethos of letting personal greed run riot can actually have some quite damaging results. Who knew?

Meanwhile, Larry Elliot laments the dearth of serious heavyweight economists alive in the present day to offer the empirical rather than theoretical analysis that the world economy desperately needs.

Also on economic matters, Alex Kroll gives a good breakdown of how the US financial bailout effectively rewards the authors of the banking crisis, at huge cost to the taxpayer, and in a way that sets the scene for repeated disasters further down the line. Barack Obama shares responsibility for these measures, incidentally. So much for putting the needs of Main Street before the needs of Wall Street.

And so much for new beginnings on US foreign policy. Tom Englehardt sets out here the ways in which the Obama White House is transplanting many of the worst crimes and misjudgements of the Bush era onto America's new "Af-Pak" (Afghanistan-Pakistan) war. Extrajudicial executions? Aerial bombing causing massive civilian casualties which in turn breeds further extremism? How many of those who voted for Obama signed up for more of this?

There does appear to be some small movement however on the Israeli-Palestinian question, with the Obama White House making US support for Israeli colonialism less than totally unequivocal as compared to the Bush approach. The changes in policy are actually fairly minor. Instead of mumbling that Israel's expansion of its illegal settlements on colonised Palestinian land is "unhelpful", and then continuing to fund it anyway, Obama and his administration are now saying strongly that expansion must cease. That's something. But note that we've yet to see what action the new White House is prepared to take to enforce this, if it comes to it, and note also that the problem is the extent of existing settlements, not merely the possibility that they might grow further. The existing settlements already preclude the viability of a Palestinian state, taking as they do the best land on the West Bank and cutting off East Jerusalem, the beating heart of Palestinian economic, religious and cultural life, from the other Palestinian population centres. These settlements are in any case 100 per cent illegal and allowing any of them to remain would be to reward aggression and theft on the international stage. Obama therefore has barely begun to deal with this issue properly, and nor can we assume that he will. But even so, these small moves have sent Israeli leaders into paroxysms, like spoilt children who suddenly realise the game is up. This dispite the fact that in reality, Israel is not being asked to concede anything that is more than symbolic, which in itself gives you a sense of the warped relationship of dependency and indulgence that it has with the US. Rami Khouri of Lebanon's Daily Star gives a fair assessment of the situation here. And in recent weeks I've also been enjoying the blog Mondoweiss, which gives a sensitive and intelligent account of the issue from a liberal Jewish-American perspective. That's updated at least once daily, and its a good way of following debates on the US-Israeli relationship.

Closer to home, Gareth Peirce writes in the London Review of Books on New Labour's complicity in torture under the war on terror. This unsettling article lays bare an altogether sinister side to the way our country is governed. If you think ID cards are a sign of creeping authoritarianism, Peirce's article will rather put that in perspective. Her earlier article on the severe pressures facing British Muslims in the current climate is a good companion piece.

Rethinking Afghanistan

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald is producing a new documentary on the Afghanistan War and releasing it on-line. Here's the website where you can view the film, and access a wealth of information on the war - a fantastic resource.

Meanwhile over at TomDispatch, Tom Engelhardt reminds us that there's a bigger question to ask about the Afghanistan War than the tactical one of "can we win or not?" - i.e. the moral question of whether, in the interests of our security, its legitimate to destroy the security of others. The equivalent of several 9/11s-worth of innocent Afghan civilians have been killed since the invasion of 2001; the UN tallies 828 as killed by Western forces last year alone, in what is likely to be a serious underestimate. The US-NATO habit of applying massive firepower from the air is bound to cause extensive civilian casualties, and also as a result drive more enraged Afghans into the arms of the insurgency, and perhaps al-Qaeda itself.

In The Nation, Nick Turse reminds us that such scenarios are not new in imperial wars of pacification, with his award-winning exposé on Vietnam's "Operation Speedy Express"; an offensive which saw grotesque levels of civilian slaughter at the hands of the US military. Methods may have changed over the past 40 years, but the basic dynamics of powerful nations imposing their will on smaller ones through the application of mechanised violence remain essentially intact. We'd do well to remember that next time we're tempted to think of Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq, as "The Good War".

Gaza: the aftermath

Israel revealed

“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

Moshe Yaalon, Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, 2002

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Below is a report from the UK’s Channel 4 news last week on just one of the many atrocities perpetrated by Israel’s armed forces in Gaza.

Metres from an Israeli military position, four starving children too weak to stand, sat in the ruins of a house amongst at least twelve decomposing corpses, some of them the children’s mothers. For four days the Israelis prevented Red Cross ambulances from rescuing the children. Eventually, ambulances were allowed into the neighbourhood, but the Israelis would not clear a path so that they could access the scene itself. Red Cross medics then had to resort to removing the children by donkey cart, whilst the Israeli soldiers looked on.

In what looks like an effort to provide a dictionary definition of chutzpah, Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev tells Channel 4’s reporter Alex Thompson, when questioned about this, that Israel “wants to work closely” with the Red Cross who, he generously concedes, play “an important role”.

Watch this video, in particular, for Regev’s smirking defence of Israel’s actions. Thompson is clearly stunned by what the Red Cross has told him, and demands of Regev “in the name of humanity, what is Israel doing?”. It is moments like this when the mask slips, and the reality of Israel’s contempt for Palestinian life is laid bare. Remember Regev’s performance here next time you see an Israeli military spokesperson on the TV news, or read an newspaper op-ed by one of Israel’s many apologists in the Western political class. These people will say anything. No atrocity is too gruesome for them to defend.

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Since I’ve not posted for a week, lets just quickly remind ourselves of the basic facts regarding Israel’s attack on Gaza. Regular readers will excuse a bit of repetition from previous posts.

Israel claims that it is acting in self-defence, responding to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip. This is a flat-out lie.

There was a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas starting in mid June which Hamas maintained and Israel breached at the start of November, sparking the current round of violence. As Gareth Porter notes here, Hamas made moves to reinstate the ceasefire in mid-December, which were rejected by Israel.

“The interest of Hamas in a ceasefire agreement that would actually open the border crossings was acknowledged at a Dec. 21 Israeli cabinet meeting -- five days before the beginning of the Israeli military offensive -- by Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's internal security agency, Shin Bet. "Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce," Diskin was quoted by Y-net News agency as saying.”

Porter also describes how Israel entered into the original ceasefire in bad faith, never intending to honour its conditions in respect of easing the siege of Gaza even though it knew that this would probably lead to further violence. Hamas, by contrast, worked hard to keep the ceasefire in effect, until Israel finally sabotaged it with the attacks of 4 November.

No Israelis were killed in the months leading up to the beginning of its all-out assault on Gaza, on 27 December 2008. In “response” to no deaths and a ceasefire, Israel launched a war of aggression in which it has, as of this morning, slaughtered (I use the word deliberately) 1038 Palestinians and wounded 4850. Of the dead, over 300 are children and 76 are women. Of the injured, 1,600 are children and 678 women. Many of the rest are ordinary police and municipal workers, not militants belonging to the armed wing of Hamas or any other group.

As a number of legal experts point out in this letter to The Sunday Times, and as George Bisharat, professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, writes here, Israel is not acting in a way that can be justified or legitimately described as self-defence. Israel is committing aggression, the gravest of all international crimes

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As I noted in earlier posts on the assault on Gaza, Israel has mounted a huge propaganda effort – through its ministries and embassies, but also through ostensibly independent advocacy groups and bloggers - to win the battle for global public opinion and secure the support or acquiescence of the world’s governments while it carries out its attacks. But this is now unravelling, as it was bound to. The dissonance between the pious ‘what-would-you-do?’ refrains of Israel’s apologists and the bloody reality of its actions is simply too wide to bridge.

Today, the Israel military attacked the compound of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), with white phosphorus shells. White phosphorus is a particularly nasty chemical weapon that burns the flesh down to the bone, and which Israel had already been dropping on the crowded refugee camps of Gaza. UN officials expressed outrage at the attack, and poured scorn on Israel’s defence of its actions. In my view, it is near-impossible to portray this as an Israeli mistake, given that the compound is a well-known location in Gaza clearly marked with blue UN flags. John Ging, the head of UN operations in Gaza, told al-Jazeera television: "This is going to burn down the entire warehouse … thousands and thousands of tonnes of food, medical supplies and other emergency assistance is there." Elsewhere, reports emerge of the Israeli military shooting at fleeing civilians, including those waving white flags.

The word you’re looking for is ‘sadistic’.

Serious moves may now be made the United Nations to bring Israel before the international legal system. There is talk of referring its recent actions to the International Court of Justice, or even for ad-hoc tribunals to be set up, similar to those that dealt with the large-scale crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The Lancet, one of the world's best-known and most respected medical journals, has published an editorial strongly condemning Israeli for committing "large and indiscriminate human atrocities".

The European Union, is backing off from moves to strengthen its ties with Israel, with the patience and ingulgence of the European political class being tested to the limit by Israel’s barbarity. Even Israel's closest friends in Europe are horrified by its actions. This from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“A few days ago, I met a European ambassador stationed in Israel. The man, a great friend of Israel, launched an emotional monologue and spoke from the bottom of his heart.

"Make no mistake," he said. "I understand why you embarked on the operation in Gaza, and many of my colleagues also understand and even support it, but a few days ago you started to cross red lines."

The ambassador continued, reiterating his support and his love for Israel. "We too would like to damage Hamas, we too would not sit by quietly if they were firing rockets at us," he said. "It was clear to us that innocent people would be hurt in any operation in Gaza, and we were prepared to accept that up to certain limit, but in the past few days it seems that your action is getting out of control, and the harm to civilians is tremendous."

The straw that broke the camel's back for that ambassador was the Red Cross report from Gaza that small children had been found wounded, near the corpses of their mothers, under the ruins of their homes, and other reports of civilians on the verge of dying in places ambulances could not reach because of the fighting.

"The international organizations in Gaza are talking about 200 dead children," he said. "I don't know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government," added the ambassador. "Your action is brutal and you don't realize how much damage this is causing you in the world. This is not only short term. It's damage for years. Is this the Israel you want to be?"

A similar message also came across in a conversation that President Shimon Peres had with the delegation of European foreign ministers who came to Jerusalem a week ago. Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Union Commissioner responsible for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy, said to Peres: "You have the right to self-defense, but what is happening in Gaza is beyond all proportion. I am telling you, Mr. President, Israel's image in the world has been destroyed."” [my emphasis]

A degree of anger was even expressed in a parliamentary debate here in London. Britain is one of Israel’s strongest supporters (and its role in this conflict is something I intend to write more about presently). Israel is also alienating Turkey, possibly its closest ally in the region. And even the US media, famous for its incredible bias in favour of Israel, is discovering an at times strongly critical voice.

Note that these are friends of the Israeli government, not its enemies or even its critics. Presumably the aim of Israel’s PR campaign over Gaza was to extend or at least consolidate support. In the event, not only is opposition ignited worldwide but pre-existing support is evaporating, for the simple reason that its very hard to spin your way out of responsibility for mass murder.

The fact is that for a great many people, the bloodshed of the past three weeks will have gone a considerable distance towards clarifying matters where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned. It is now plain, were it not already, that the problem is not Hamas or Islamic Jihad, represhensible though those groups are. The problem is Israel: its government, its military, its political class, and its transnational supporting cast of propagandists. It is Israel that is responsible for the vast majority of death and destruction in the conflict. Israel that is the aggressor. Israel whose limitlessly cruel and flagrantly illegal occupation of Palestinian land creates the conditions in which terrorism is bound to flourish. The case for Israel, of a peaceful state that goes to war only in self-defence, is now shot to bits. It has no credibility, and neither do those who peddle it, not least since these people have spent the past three weeks treating us to the ugly sight and sound of their apologias for the slaughter of innocent people (large numbers of children included).

Condemnations of Hamas and attempts to divert the blame for the conflict onto the Palestinians will ring increasingly hollow as the public mind recalls the sight of dying children on the TV news, of attacks on aid facilities, of the indiscriminate bombardment of a million and a half people trapped in an open air prison. To those remaining few who could not see it, Israel has now revealed itself. The callous, racist mindset that conceives of these atrocities is the mindset that the Palestinians have been up against for over 60 years; something that may now be a little better understood. I suspect that the Israeli government has made a profound impression on world opinion since 27 December 2008, but perhaps not the one it was aiming for.

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For more analysis, I could make no better recommendation than Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; by far the most informed and insightful analyst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past several decades. Follow this link to hear him speaking about the current situation.

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I’ll finish by reiterating a point I've made several times previously (so again, apologies to regular readers). You’re not obliged to simply watch these events unfold. There are practical, small things you can do which, when combined with the individual efforts of many others, add up to something significant. The first of those is donating money to the relief effort. This is one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world, and its entirely man-made. The world’s top aid agencies are trying to get food and medical supplies to the victims of Israel’s bombing, and you can rely on them to make best use of whatever amount you can afford to give. You can donate to Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children, CAFOD, or any aid agency you prefer. Those NGOs are also good sources of information on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

The other thing you can do is protest. Israel is making every effort to win the PR war, and public protest can undermine that, thus increasing pressure on Israel to bring its murderous actions to an end. Demonstrations large and small continue throughout the UK - there may well be one near you - and, if you’re not resident in Britain, I’m sure the anti-war groups in your country have their own campaigns in action.

"You're shooting at kids, don't you understand that?"

War is the enabler of humanity's darkest instincts; a force of nature that cruelly exposes the depths to which we're capable of sinking. But occasionally, it allows us a glimpse of the best of humanity as well; its challenges met by the bravery of at least some of us.

The footage above, from Korean television, shows Palestinians on the West Bank demonstrating against the assault on Gaza clashing with Israeli troops. The heroic young woman who stands between the Israeli guns and the Palestinians - imploring "you're shooting at kids, don't you understand that?" - is Huweida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement. Her actions are reminiscent of those of the unknown Chinese man who placed himself in front of a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, 1989.

For every Israeli soldier, Hamas miliant, armchair apologist for Israeli massacres or international statesperson working to block a ceasefire until Israel has achieved its military objectives, there's an aid worker, an ISM volunteer, a person documenting abuses for a human rights organisation, an Israeli who refused to fight with the IDF on moral grounds, and activist, a protester, and so on and so on. Even war offers no excuse for cynicism, provided we're prepared to look squarely at the whole picture. The correct response to the bloodletting of the past fortnight is not cynicism about our fellow human beings but a question, "what am I doing to help?"

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Amnesty International now says explicitly that the Israeli military is targeting civilians:

"..civilians – particularly the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza – continue to both be targeted and suffer disproportionately in this conflict".

Remember that generous daily three-hour ceasefire that Israel is introducing, so that the Palestinians can get "whatever they need"? Save the Children says its "completely inadequate". Such ingratitude. I mean, what's Israel got to do? Stop killing innocent people for the other 21 hours in the day as well?

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Wednesday evening, the Telegraph reported:

"Growing evidence emerged today of the bloodiest single incident of the Gaza conflict when around 70 corpses were found by a Palestinian paramedic near a bombed-out house. Concerns had been growing that Zeitoun had witnessed massive civilian casualties after surviving members of the Samouni clan reached Gaza City three days ago."

"They said that after the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the clan to gather in a single house owned by Wael Samouni around dawn on Sunday. "

"At 6.35am on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life."

"Convoys of ambulances twice headed to the area to look for wounded but they were driven back by Israeli shooting."

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has more on this.

A press release from the International Committee of the Red Cross begins:

"On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to obtain access for the first time to several houses in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City that had been affected by Israeli shelling."

"The ICRC had requested safe passage for ambulances to access this neighbourhood since 3 January but it only received permission to do so from the Israel Defense Forces during the afternoon of 7 January. "

"The ICRC/PRCS team found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. "

"They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses. "

"In another house, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israel Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks. "

""This is a shocking incident," said Pierre Wettach, the ICRC's head of delegation for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.""

The US ambassador to the UN told the media this week that absolutely no "equivalence" could be drawn between the Israeli military and Hamas. I agree. Whether Hamas wanted to or not, it simply does not have the means to cause anything remotely like the bloodbath we have seen over the past fortnight in the Gaza strip. Israelis have never suffered at the hands of Palestinian groups anything resembling the horrors we are witnessing now. Overall, in the eight years since the second intifada began, 1,000 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. Israel has killed more than three quarters that number of Palestinians in just under two weeks. 5,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel between September 2000 and November 2008 - that number has been swelled by 15 per cent less than a fortnight. In fact, given that Israel is preventing both medics and journalists from properly accessing Gaza, the currently cited death toll of 770 may be a serious underestimate.

So yes, there is no "equivalence".

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The above three stories come via Jamie Stern-Weiner's blog The Heathlander, which has been very impressive over the last two weeks in compiling information and analysis on the attack on Gaza. Bookmark it and visit often. Another good source is Middle East historian, Juan Cole.

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At TheRealNews, Phyllis Bennis, a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC., gives a good, clear assessment of a number of important factors: the background to current events, the US role, the legal status of Israel's actions and the problems faced by the United Nations in bringing the crisis to an end.

More from me soon

Gaza: Israeli PR vs bloody reality

As I've noted in previous posts, Israel's attack on Gaza is being accompanied by a massive propaganda effort – through its ministries and embassies, but also through ostensibly independent advocacy groups and bloggers - to win the battle for global public opinion and secure the support or acquiescence the world’s governments while the assault continues.

But any PR campaign of this sort will run into serious credibility problems when its claims are so palpably contrary to the obvious facts.

So take the big lie, that Hamas broke its ceasefire with Israel and Israel then had to act militarily to defend its population from Hamas rockets. This is a straightforward inversion of reality. Hamas maintained the ceasefire for four months. It was Israel which broke it on the 5 November with an incursion into Gaza that killed 6 militants. Rocket fire, predictably, resumed after this point. But no Israelis were killed - none - during the six months leading up to the start of Israel's current assault, which has now taken over 550 Palestinian lives.

Or take the second big lie, that Israel is targeting Hamas and making every effort to avoid civilian casualties. It has by now been copiously documented by the world's most respected aid agencies, human rights organisations and NGOs (see here for an excellent summary) that Israel's claims in this regard are flat-out false. Amongst the "Hamas targets" and "terrorist infrastructure" struck by the Israeli military - as documented by the NGOs - are hospitals, ambulances and medical workers, mosques, schools, government buildings and civil policemen, news media, general civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves including, of course, the children that make up 56 per cent of Gaza's population. AFP now reports that "More than a quarter of the hundreds of dead from the Gaza conflict are children and aid groups say the survivors will suffer physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives....Aid workers believe just about every Gaza child has been traumatised by the incessant bombardment.."

In the interview with CBS television at the top of this post, a Norweigan doctor on the scene in Gaza, Mads Gilbert, said “anyone who tries to portray this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza”.

So when, in the face of all this, Israel's Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that there is “no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, its not just that people know she’s lying. Its what she’s lying about that is bound to shock the ordinary person. Because where, in the end, are one’s sympathies most likely to fall? With the Palestinian father weeping in anguish over the lifeless bodies of his three infant children – the picture on the front of today’s Guardian – or with the person who approved the military campaign which killed those children and who now jets round the world giving press conferences pretending that the consequences of her actions do not exist? After performances like Livni’s, Israel can almost say what it likes. I suspect many people who watched the CBS interview above will be deaf to Israeli PR campaigns from now on.

Given this chasm between Israel’s PR and the known reality, it is reasonable to predict that the propadanda campaign will not only fail, but backfire disastrously. The offence caused by the sight of the atrocities Israel is committing will only be compounded by the cynicism and apparent inhumanity of those who are clearly prepared to say anything to defend these attacks.

There are, as far as I’m aware, no polls as yet on world public reaction to events in Gaza. But I think we can expect widespread opposition of the kind that met Israel’s war on Lebanon two years ago. There are a couple of hints toward that hypothesis. US public opinion – which to an extent not true of other populations is relentlessly bombarded with pro-Israel propaganda from its news media and pundit class – is still ‘closely divided’ on whether Israel’s recent actions are justified. One would therefore expect countries where the coverage of the situation is less unbalanced to show greater levels of opposition to Israel’s actions, as was indeed the case two years ago.

Then take this editorial in the Financial Times, which comes out strongly against Israel. A Financial Times editorial is a good indicator of the thinking of socio-economic and political elites (consider who those articles are written by and written for). And its also true that such elites tend to be to the right of the public (see, for example, the gaps between the US public and its political class on foreign policy).

So if the US public and the Financial Times editorial writers, where we would perhaps least expect opposition to Israel’s actions, are either split or opposed to the attack on Gaza, then that does not bode well for Israel in terms of how more liberal sectors (e.g. public opinion in the rest of the world or political opinion in Europe) will react.

In a great piece of analysis here, Juan Cole, Professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan and a prominent commentator on US policy towards the region, speculates that Israel’s propaganda effort may fail partly because people are now well used to seeing these sorts of lies, half-truths and distortions from the Bush White House, and so are less likely to fall for it again.

One more thing. When Israel attacked Lebanon two years ago Tony Blair suffered significant political damage for leading his government in supporting Israel’s assault and blocking calls for a ceasefire. Gordon Brown has apparently taken a different stance, calling for an immediate ceasefire. Or has he? According to Craig Murray - former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job after speaking out against the human rights abuses of the Tashkent regime - the British position on Gaza is not what it appears.

Murray says: “Brown is appeasing domestic horror at the Israeli massacre in Gaza by calling for a ceasefire. Meanwhile British diplomats on the United Nations Security Council are under direct instructions to offer “tacit support” to United States’ efforts to block a ceasefire. I have been told this directly by a former colleague in the UK Mission to the United Nations.” [Here’s the link. I’d warn the faint hearted that some understandably strong language is used by the former ambassador]

We can’t say for 100% certain whether Murray’s information is accurate, but I would view it as being likely to be true given the connections he must have. If it is true, it will count as the darkest and most disgraceful episode in Brown’s premiership to date. One hopes that any pretence on the part of Brown - to be trying to end the killing when in fact he is trying to prolong it - will be exposed in the same way that Israel’s propaganda about the atrocities it is committing are being exposed, daily, to people all over the world.

Gaza: roundup of analysis

Perhaps the hardest thing about watching these news reports showing families in Gaza trembling under Israeli bombardment is the thought that some of the mothers, fathers and children we see in these pictures may not survive the next few days and weeks. What we see here could be their last moments; indeed, by the time these reports reach us they may already have been killed, or be lying in the makeshift emergency ward of a broken-down and overwhelmed Gazan hospital. The fact is, we’ll probably never know.

With its air force having softened Gaza up with a week of bombing that has killed almost 500 people and injured over two thousand (Gaza has no anti-aircraft defences of course), Israel has now launched its ground invasion, sending tanks into the small coastal strip that is home to 1.5 million Palestinian people (many of them refugees driven from their former homes in the very parts of Israel from which those tanks now come). The United States has blocked a UN Security Council statement that would have called for an immediate ceasefire.

Today I’d like to recommend a few comment and analysis articles I’ve read on the past week’s events.

Chris McGreal is one of the Guardian/Observer’s finest correspondents, and his piece in this morning’s Observer is an excellent work of analytical journalism. McGreal describes the huge propaganda effort that Israel is undertaking – through its ministries and embassies, but also through ostensibly independent advocacy groups and bloggers - to win the battle for global public opinion and secure the support or acquiescence the world’s governments while it carries out its attacks. He then examines the content of Israel’s PR effort and the justifications it is offering for its actions, finding – surprise surprise – that the Israeli case is essentially bogus. So I place this article at the top of my list and recommend it highly.

Another good examination and deconstruction of Israel’s case for attacking Gaza is provided by Tony Karon, a senior editor at Time.com and - especially in his personal capacity as a blogger - a very smart and perceptive analyst of the politics of Middle East.

Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, provides this timely and thoughtful article on how repression and violence rely on the suspension of empathy and the denial of the humanity of one’s victims. Gideon Levy, one of Israel’s best journalists, writes powerfully on that same theme in this article.

Neve Gordon and Jeff Halper note that many of those on the pro-Israeli government side who attacked the proposed boycott of Israeli universities on grounds of academic freedom were strangely quiet when Israel bombed a university in Gaza last week. Apparently, while boycotting Israeli universities is bad, bombing Palestinian universities is nothing to get steamed up about.

(To note: the argument in favour of an academic boycott has been that Israeli universities are often complicit in the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, at least at some level, and that boycotts and divestment can be an important means of pressuring a government to change unjust policies, as was the case with Apartheid South Africa. I don’t agree with the idea myself (and nor did many others who are concerned for the plight of the Palestinians). I think an arms boycott (for one thing) would be a better targeted action. But I absolutely do not stand with the critics of the proposed boycott from the pro-Israeli government side; people who seem to care remarkably little for the Palestinians and who certainly need to get their facts and their arguments straight)

On the liberal US political website The Huffington Post, Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouthi provides his own refutation of the key myths of the Israeli propaganda effort. Barghouthi is a secular liberal who advocates non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation and his account of the past week’s events is rooted in the factual record. Yet still the Huffington Post, as is typical of the moral cowardice that afflicts many US liberals where Israel is concerned, sees fit to handle his opinions with rubber gloves, inserting the weasel words that his “views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Huffington Post”, a disclaimer that apparently no other Post contributor requires. Well, at least they published it.

If you want some deeper background, I can recommend, for one thing, Khaled Hroub's "Hamas: A Beginner's Guide". It’s a good, solid introduction to the subject. Highly informed, readable, and benefitting from some thoughtful and balanced analysis, its probably the best of the books available on Hamas. More good information on the group can be found at Conflicts Forum.

I’ll finish by reiterating a point I made earlier in the week. You’re not obliged to simply watch these events unfold. There are practical, small things you can do which, when combined with the small individual efforts of many others, add up to something significant. The first of those is donating money to the relief effort. The world’s top aid agencies are trying to get humanitarian supplies to the victims of Israel’s bombing, and you can rely on them to make best use of whatever amount you can afford to give. You can donate to Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children, CAFOD, or any aid agency you prefer.

The other thing you can do is protest. Israel is making every effort to win the PR war, and public protest can undermine that, thus increasing pressure on Israel to bring its murderous actions to an end. There are demonstrations planned in the UK throughout this week and, if you’re not resident in Britain, I’m sure the anti-war groups in your country have their own campaigns in action.

Gaza: 700,000 children with nowhere to run

Israel's destruction of Gaza continues. Civilians, including children, continue to die in large numbers.

While Israel blocks shipments of humanitarian aid.

The Gaza strip is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with 1.5 million people living in an area of 360 square kilometers; roughly equivalent to the size of Sheffield in the UK or Atlanta, Georgia in the US (both of whose populations are around a third that of Gaza).

About 700,000 of Gaza's population are children under the age of 14. The median age in Gaza is 17.

Israel has been relentlessly pouring high-explosives into this area, from the sky, for three and a half days now, and preventing aid from reaching those affected. The pretence that these attacks were aimed only at military targets, and that they were a response to Palestinian aggression, has long since fallen away. Israel's is a war of choice, and it is being waged indiscriminately.

Amnesty International has issued two clear, concise and strong statements (here and here) criticising both sides for their conduct in the conflict, but reserving the large majority of its criticism, quite correctly, for Israel.

Although Israel has just rejected a truce to allow the provision of aid, it remains vital that as much aid as possible is available, in the event that some can be got through to the people who need it, if not soon then at least when the bombing finally stops. Please donate something, whatever you can afford, to Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children, CAFOD, or any aid agency you prefer.

Gaza: the word you’re looking for is ‘massacre’

Let's clarify five key points about Israel’s attacks on Gaza this weekend.

First, “self-defence” isn’t a catch-all justification for any act of violence one cares to perpetrate. Violence is permitted in self-defence – both in common morality and international law – strictly on the basis of proportionality: i.e. the minimum necessary to repel the attack.

Israel claims its bombardment of the Gaza strip is aimed at defending itself from rocket attacks by Palestinian militant groups. In the past eight years, Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza have killed around 18 people in southern Israel. Between the start of the recent Hamas-Israel truce in June this year until the start of the Israeli bombing campaign on Saturday, no Israelis were killed by Hamas. Since Saturday, Israel has killed more than 300 Palestinians, including scores of civilians, and since those attacks began two Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets.

Overall, since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, around 1,000 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians and around 5,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, including 1,000 minors. That is to say that in just over the past forty-eight hours, Israel has killed a third as many Palestinians as Palestinians have killed Israelis in eight years. In a single weekend, Israel has increased the number of people it has killed since September 2000 by 6 per cent.

Therefore, since its actions are so grossly disproportionate to the threat they are said to be aimed at, Israel’s justification of self-defence plainly does not stand.

Second, while Israel claims to be targeting Palestinian militants, it is plainly not possible to “target” individuals in one of the most densely populated areas on the planet with the use of bombs and missiles fired from F-16 fighter jets. In fact, attacking Palestinian cities at 11:30 on a Saturday morning, when the streets were full, shows – shall we say – the direct opposite of an effort to avoid civilian casualties.

Israel claims that, unlike its enemies, it does not deliberately attack civilians. The distinction between targeting civilians and taking action that is absolutely certain to kill civilians, and which is totally disproportionate to the claimed purpose of the action, is not just a fine distinction. It is, in moral terms, no distinction.

Watch the video above; a news report from one of Gaza’s hospitals, already desperately short of medical supplies as a result of Israel’s blockade. Look at the infant child who appears towards the end of the report, clearly suffering from serious head injuries and in what appears to be a state of total shock. It’s an unbearable sight. Well, Israel and its apologists are claiming that those injuries were inflicted on that infant child - by an Israeli piloting a multi-million dollar, US-supplied fighter jet - in “self-defence”.

It doesn’t stand up, does it?

Thirdly, this is in no sense an Israeli “response”. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, noted earlier this month:

"the situation [has] worsened [since] the breakdown of a truce between Hamas and Israel that had been observed for several months by both sides. The truce was maintained by Hamas despite the failure of Israel to fulfil its obligation under the agreement to improve the living conditions of the people of Gaza. The recent upsurge of violence occurred after an Israeli incursion that killed several alleged Palestinian militants within Gaza."

Israel has maintained a blockade on the Gaza strip since early 2006, when the Palestinians committed the crime of voting the wrong way in an election. In the words of Israeli Government adviser Dov Weisglass, “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet”, so as to encourage them to reconsider their choice of Hamas over the US/Israeli-backed Fatah. The blockade has been tightened in stages since then, most notably when Hamas foiled a US backed coup-attempt by Fatah in the summer of 2007 and seized control of Gaza.

As a result of the blockade, Gaza has been forced into appalling levels of deprivation. Even by September 2006, The Independent was reporting that some Palestinian mothers had been reduced to scouring rubbish dumps for just enough food to feed their children once a day, and the situation has deteriorated sharply since then, especially in recent weeks. The UN Special Rapporteur, along with all leading aid agencies and human rights organisations, has consistently condemned the blockade in the strongest terms, with Falk stating that “[s]uch a policy of collective punishment, initiated by Israel to punish Gazans for political developments within the Gaza strip, constitutes a continuing flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”.

Fourthly, a more fundamental point cannot pass without mention. The root cause of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not Palestinian terrorism, however disgusting the attacks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad undoubtedly are. The state of Israel was created in 1948 by the violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, forcing them out into neighbouring states and territories, like Gaza, where they and their descendents continue to live – as stateless refugees – to this day. In the “Six Day War” of 1967, Israel seized further territories - Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank - which it then began to colonise, all in clear violation of international law which forbids both the acquisition of territory by force and the colonisation of such territories.

There is now a clear international consensus on the solution to this conflict: Israel should withdraw to its recognised borders, handing back the illegally occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, who would then build their own state there. Last month the UN General Assembly voted 164-7 in favour of a settlement based on this formula: i.e. on Israeli compliance with international law. In the rejectionist camp were Israel, the United States, Australia, and four South Pacific island nations. Iran was one of the 164 who voted in favour. The Arab states, including the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, have been pushing for a specific peace initiative on this formula for many years. And even Hamas, in May 2006, joined with the other Palestinian factions in signing up to a “National Conciliation Document” calling for a Palestinian state on the legal, 1967 borders, in accordance with the repeated statements of leading Hamas officials in recent years.

In other words, the conflict continues, to the extent that it does today, because Israel would sooner massacre innocent people in Gaza, if that’s what it takes, than hand back the land it has stolen and allow the Palestinians the right to have their own country and run their own affairs.

The fifth and final point is that Israel is able adopt this position because a few key states are prepared to provide strong backing for its rejectionist stance. As the leading international affairs scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have noted, Israel

“has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance [from the US] since 1976 [receiving] roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. [In addition] Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 [UN] Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It [also] played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords ... consistently support[ing] the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.”

No words need be wasted on the stance adopted by the outgoing Bush administration, to the conflict in general or to these latest atrocities in particular. What is more noteworthy is the response from people we might have expected slightly better from. For President-elect Barack Obama, the “fierce urgency of now” appears to have been replaced over the weekend by the fierce urgency of “monitoring the situation”. One suspects that, if Hamas had butchered scores of Israelis in cold blood over the weekend, Obama would not be hiding behind the protocol of “one President at a time”. He would be falling over himself to make a strong moral statement, rightly, and just as he should be doing now.

Or take British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who called for “Gazan militants to cease all rocket attacks on Israel immediately”, but for Israel merely to “do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties”. Why is it so hard for Britain to simply and unambiguously call for both sides to cease all fire immediately? Are we having a re-run of the summer of 2006, when Israel carried out weeks of indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon while Tony Blair’s government worked in the international diplomatic arena to block calls for a ceasefire? Why does Britain continue to sell arms to Israel, including key components for the fighter jets carrying out the current attacks? Is this what New Labour calls an enlightened, ethical foreign policy?

I’ll conclude by saying this. There is no law forcing people to just sit at home and shake their heads while their governments aid and abet Israel’s massacre of innocent civilians. Israel depends on international support or acquiescence for it to continue on this path, and our governments rely on our support or acquiescence to maintain their own wretched positions. You can change this equation. There are protests taking place all over Britain, today and later on this week, including one outside the Israeli embassy this afternoon. If you can attend one of these events, even for a short time, then please do. If not, it is the simplest thing to write a letter to your MP and MEPs. This website helps you to do it, via email, in a few minutes. Ask them what they personally are doing to end the Israeli atrocities. If you get a poor response, write again and demand a better one.

It was the accumulation of thousands of small individual acts like this that helped bring about an end to Apartheid. It was partly the strength of public revulsion at Blair’s role in the Israeli-Hezbollah war that hastened his own departure from office two years ago. When you see those horrific images on the news bulletins today remember, this is not something you have to accept.

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Update - thanks to Jamie SW for pointing out an error in the overall death toll above, now corrected (its 1,000 rather than 600 Israeli deaths since September 2008). Jamie's blog has some excellent and very well researched coverage of these events, which I recommend you check out.

Liberated attention-seekers of the world....you have nothing to lose but your shoes

Why did an Iraqi journalist, Muntazir al-Zaidi, throw his shoes at US President George Bush during a press conference on Sunday? Well, according to Bush, "that's what happens in free societies when people try to draw attention to themselves".

Now lets have a think. What other reasons might there be for an Iraqi to want to throw his shoes (a particularly grave insult in the Arab world) at George W Bush?

Could it be related to the fact that the US invasion and occupation may by now have resulted in the deaths of over a million Iraqis (or around one in every twenty-nine of the population) and well over 4 million being driven out of their homes (or around one in every six of the population) according to the best estimates available? Those refugees were often driven into poverty and marginalisation in neighbouring countries, their children into malnutrition, their daughters into prostitution, while those left behind fared little better, be they the maimed, the bereaved, the unemployed, the impoverished, the imprisoned or the tortured. What are the odds of the anger of this Iraqi journalist towards the US President having to do with any of those things?

What about the systematic sexual abuse and torture carried out by Bush's troops at Abu Ghraib? What about the recent outbreak of cholera, merely the latest example of the train-wreck society Iraq has become?

Or maybe it was because the war - an aggressive war of choice, instigated under a cloak of propaganda and straightforward lying - was, at root, aimed at no more lofty a goal than the acquisition of greater wealth and power, through control over Iraq's vast oil reserves?

For George Bush, the obvious reason an Iraqi would throw shoes at him is because George liberated the guy and because the guy is an attention seeker. Might any other thoughts have occurred to the President, if he had given himself a little more time to consider it?

I suppose maybe the shoe-thrower could be one of those "anti-Americans" you hear about. Probably he hates freedom and our way of life, or something. Or maybe he's just ungrateful.

McClatchy reports that "al-Zaidi covered the U.S. bombing of Baghdad's Sadr City area earlier this year and had been "emotionally influenced" by the destruction he'd seen". The fact that the US still bombs densely populated civilian areas in Iraq, 5 years after liberation, is one of the major untold stories of the conflict. It is, however, no secret to Iraqis.

“This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” al-Zaidi shouted as he threw his second shoe. The New York Times reports that al-Zaidi was then "beaten by members of the prime minister’s security detail, who hauled him out of the room in his white socks. Mr. Zaidi’s cries could be heard from a nearby room as the news conference continued", no doubt another egotisitcal attempt to draw attention to himself. According to al-Zaidi's fellow reporter Mohammed Taher, the guards kicked him and beat him until "he was crying like a woman" while President Bush joked and smirked his way through the remainder of the press conference.

Al-Zaidi is now in the hands of Iraq's criminal justice system where. According to a Human Rights Watch report released Sunday:

"Torture and other forms of abuse in Iraqi detention facilities, frequently to elicit confessions in early stages of detention, are well documented. The reliance on confessions in the court’s proceedings, coupled with the absence of physical or other corroborating evidence, raises the possibility of serious miscarriages of justice. In at least 10 investigative hearings and two trials that Human Rights Watch observed, defendants renounced confessions submitted as evidence. In most of those cases, the defendants said they had been physically abused or threatened by interrogators."

Sami Ramadani, a political exile from the regime of Saddam Hussein and now a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, has a good article in the Guardian today explaining what motivated al-Zaidi, and what his actions meant to many Iraqis.

"Muntadhar [al-Zaidi] is a secular socialist whose hero happens to be Che Guevara. He became a prominent leftwing student leader immediately after the occupation, while at Baghdad University's media college. He reported for al-Baghdadia on the poor and downtrodden victims of the US war. He was first on the scene in Sadr City and wherever people suffered violence or severe deprivation. He not only followed US Apache helicopters' trails of death and destruction, but he was also among the first to report every "sectarian" atrocity and the bombing of popular market places. He let the victims talk first.

It was effective journalism, reporting that the victims of violence themselves accused the US-led occupation of being behind all the carnage. He was a voice that could not be silenced, despite being kidnapped by a gang and arrested by US and regime forces.

His passion for the war's victims and his staunchly anti-occupation message endeared him to al-Baghdadia viewers. And after sending Bush out of Iraq in ignominy he has become a formidable national hero. The orphan who was brought up by his aunt, and whose name means the longed or awaited for, has become a powerful unifying symbol of defiance, and is being adopted by countless Iraqis as "our dearest son"."

If you're in London this Friday 19 December, you can join a protest for al-Zaidi's release at 1pm, the US Embassy, 24 Grosvenor Square. Nearest tube stops are Marble Arch and Bond Street. Stop the War Coalition asks that you bring shoes.

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In other news, Prime Minister Gordon Brown today announced the withdrawal of British combat forces from Iraq, to be effected by 31 May 2009. You can read my Le Monde Diplomatique article on Britain's ignominious role in the occupation of Iraq here.