Worse than a crime

According to a U.S. Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 "bunker busters" used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these "massive ordnance penetrators," the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

"They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran," according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. "US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours," he said. "The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003," accelerating under Obama.

The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is "to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran." British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia). On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the U.S. will stay the course after the replacement of General McChrystal by his superior, General Petraeus, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior military staff, along with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S. The meeting focused "on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran," according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that, "I always try to see challenges from [the] Israeli perspective." Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.

-- Noam Chomksy.

Maybe he is right, but ever since George W. Bush was reinstalled in 2004 I have quite often thought an attack on Iran was imminent only to see that proved wrong each time.

Can they really be so monumentally foolish? If the U.S. does attack it will look as if the American government-military complex is subaltern to extremists in Israel and to AIPAC.

P.S. 4 Aug: Gwynne Dyer says the chances of a U.S. attack on Iran are practically zero.

P.S. 5 Aug: There's a chance sanctions are working, says Andrew Sullivan.

P.S. 7 Aug: David Bromwich on one more war

Golem

Tony Judt (Israel Without Clichés) and Ilan Pappé (The deadly closing of the Israeli mind) -- following Ross Douthat (Outremer and Wanted: An Israeli Strategy) -- are among the latest to be worth reading and taken seriously on the upshots of the Gaza blockade. [See also a view from naval history and a Turkish view]

Barack Obama took a bold step in announcing $400m aid package to Gaza.

The divergence between Israeli views of the recent incidents associated with Gaza and those in much of the rest of the world is remarkable. Many Israelis, reportedly, saw the deaths of civilians as matter for humour. Others, e.g. UNRWA, tried to draw attention to the severity of humanitarian in crisis in Gaza.

I happened to be reading Stephen Asma's On Monsters and was reminded of the story of Golem -- not the Lord of the Rings character but the monster created to protect the Jewish community in Prague. In the old story, Golem runs amok, turning from a protector into a hazard. It seems to me that Israelis, who have created a military superpower and do not seem to set much store by many old friendships and alliances, would be wise to recall this story.

Asma quotes a characteristic insight of Montaigne's: "I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself". Perhaps Israelis and others who are blinded by fear and rage will recover some of the sense of the miraculous nature of all lives.

Meanwhile, in the 'real world', Israeli preparations to attack Iran proceed. And Centcom is already at work.

War games

By attacking without Washington's advance knowledge, Israel had the benefits of surprise and momentum - not only over the Iranians, but over its American allies - and for the first day or two, ran circles around White House crisis managers.

-- from Imagining an Israeli attack on Iran.

Roger Cohen notes a shift in thinking in the U.S.

How Israel lost

As prophesied long ago by the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and others, the occupation -- and above all the settlement project -- have profoundly eroded the moral fiber of Israel, corroded central institutions of the society and undermined our integrity as a political community. None of this happened in a vacuum; the "other side" has much to atone for as well. But even I can remember a time when charges of war crimes were not simply sloughed off by Israel's leaders, when military mistakes that cost innocent civilian lives were acknowledged as such and elicited expressions of sorrow, and when Israeli courts clearly articulated the principle that a soldier has not only the right but indeed the duty not to carry out an order that is at odds with his consciousness as a human being or with basic human values.

-- from Israel without illusions by David Schulman.

P.S. Mustafa Barghouthi

Prussia and Israel

Uri Avnery sees similarities

Coming soon?

Is Andrew Sullivan right on a looming US Israel split?

Got Hope?

Gandhi was killed by fanatics. Mandela's legacy is at risk. But both of them, along with others, provide hope that tribalism, bigotry and hatred as prime movers in human affairs can be overcome some day.

Leviathan

A debate here on Hobbes in Hebrew.

But how much is there really to learn? Israel's 'mad dog' strategy -- readiness to use overwhelming force up to and including nuclear weapons -- suggests little has escaped attention with respect to the use of violence for ends of state.

And among supporters such as Christian Zionists in the U.S., the state has substantial numbers of citizens governed by religious belief in support of a civil power.

Blockade

The Israeli blockade on Gaza includes a ban on toys,reports Lawrence Wright.

Gandhi's children

They want to destroy our movement because it is nonviolent....We need our land.It is how we make our living. Our message to the world is that this wall is destroying our lives, and the occupation wants to kill our struggle.

-- Abdullah Abu Rahma, a village teacher, quoted in Bilin Journal

Macht keine Dummheiten

When Shmuel Goldfein — it means something like Sam the Moneygrubber — made aliyah from Plotsk, he changed his last name to Barak (Lightning), and named his son Ehud, which means something like ‘popular.’ Sam the Moneygrubber begat Popular Lightning.

-- Tony Horowitz quotes Rich Cohen in a review of Israel is Real.

Gates in the wall

Zionism, as Amos came to realize, had outlived its usefulness. "As a measure of...'affirmative action,' Zionism was useful during the formative years. Today it has become redundant." What had once been the nationalist ideology of a stateless people has undergone a tragic transition. It has, for a growing number of Israelis, been corrupted into an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact with a partisan God, a pact that justifies any and all actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies. The Zionist project, a doctrine dating to the state-building nationalisms of the late nineteenth century, has long since lost its way. It can mean little—though it can do much harm—in an established democratic state with aspirations to normality. In any case it has been hijacked by ultras. Herzl's dream of a "normal" Jewish country has become an exclusivist sectarian nightmare, a development that Amos illustrated by slightly misquoting Keats: "Fanatics have a dream by which they weave a paradise for a sect."

-- from a remembrance of Amos Elon by Tony Judt

In Wall: a monologue (available as a podcast here), David Hare explores some the meanings manifest in gader ha'harfrada (Hebrew: separation fence) or jidar al-fasl al-'unsuri (Arabic: racial segregation wall). He quotes Sari Nusseibeh:

It's like sticking someone in a cage and then when he starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place. The wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent.

An unnamed Israeli intellectual says the defining paradox of his country is that:

We look so strong from the outside, we have such a large army, so many nuclear weapons, we're so certain in our expansion, and yet from the inside it doesn't feel like that. We feel our being is not guaranteed. You might say we have imported from the Diaspora the Jewish disease — a sense of rootlessness, an ability to adapt and make do, but not to settle. After sixty years, Israel is not yet a home.

In military terms the wall looks like a classic Maginot line-type mistake, now over-topped by rockets.

George al-Kasaba, who runs a cinema in Ramallah (the only one working on the West Bank; it mostly shows Egyptian comedies), looks through the other end of the telescope:

The wall is not around us. It's around them.

See, too, the video
Gaza: The destitute and the forgotten.

(image at top via BBC)

Holy war

An investigation by reporter Uri Blau, published on Friday in Haaretz, disclosed how Israeli soldiers were ordering T-shirts to mark the end of operations [in Gaza], featuring grotesque images including dead babies, mothers weeping by their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques.

Another T-shirt designed for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex" next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A shirt designed for the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion depicts a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills".

-- Gaza war crime claims gather pace as more troops speak out

'Lawfare'

If, therefore, a conclusion can be drawn from military violence it is that... there is a lawmaking character inherent in it.

-- Eyal quotes Walter. Is it possible, he asks,

that the attack on Gaza was not restrained by an extensive use of [International Humanitarian Law] - but rather, that a certain interpretation and application of this law have enabled, not only the justification of atrocities, but crucially, the affliction of otherwise inconceivable levels of destruction? Has the chaos, death and destruction been perpetrated with the full force of the law? If this is so, should those who oppose Israeli violence use the language of international law?

Bomb bomb bomb

There’s no changing [the] Israeli lens, however distorting it may be in a changed world. That could mean an Israeli attack on Iran within a year.

-- Roger Cohen

Politicide, part 841,239,017,973,986(b)

A report from Stephen Kamlish QC here. Short excerpt:

The use of phosphorus is only lawful under international rules of engagement when used as a smokescreen cover in open areas for combatants who are caught in the open and are under fire. However, the evidence on the ground makes clear that the Israeli Army systematically and unlawfully fired phosphorus shells directly over and into populated urban areas. We visited the site of a family devastated by the illegal use of phosphorous. The man we spoke to told us how his wife and three children were asleep in a bedroom of their house. A phosphorous shell came through the roof of the house exploding in the room where the family was sleeping. On impact the mother and children were engulfed in toxic flames smoke and fumes. They died an unimaginable death in that room. We stood in the room and saw the traces of white phosphorus on the walls in the otherwise completely blackened room. A woman came into the room and held up a piece of child’s clothing covered in phosphorus burns. Another man then showed us a picture of the body of a 10-month old child who had been in the room during the attack. The heat had been so intense that it had burned the baby’s legs off.

(Hat tip OT)

'How words could end a war'

There have been similar findings before, but the exercise is clearly worth repeating in the current circumstances:

...Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.

Remarkably, our survey results were mirrored by our discussions with political leaders from both sides. For example, Mousa Abu Marzook (the deputy chairman of Hamas) said no when we proposed a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return. He became angry when we added in the idea of substantial American aid for rebuilding: "No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount."

But when we mentioned a potential Israeli apology for 1948, he brightened: "Yes, an apology is important, as a beginning. It’s not enough because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that." His response suggested that progress on sacred values might open the way for negotiations on material issues, rather than the reverse.

We got a similar reaction from Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-line former Israeli prime minister...

-- Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges

Blowback

“I think Hamas is stronger now and will be stronger in the future because of this war,” said Eyad Serraj, a psychiatrist [in Gaza] who is an opponent of Hamas. “This war has deepened the people’s feeling that it is impossible to have peace with Israel, a country that promotes death and destruction.”

-- from Israel Hopes to Complete Gaza Troop Pull-Out [in time for Obama inauguration]

Dr Abuelaish [who treated both Israeli and Arab patients, and three of whose daughters were killed in an Israeli strike] said..."Violence is never the right way. My daughters and I were armed with nothing but love and hope."

-- from Gaza doctor's loss grips Israelis

that's the paradox of Al-Jazeera's war journalism: It is flagrantly political, but accompanied by a real curiosity about other perspectives. It also makes me wish for something else: A TV network with the bravery to show the war imagery you can see on Al-Jazeera, but the integrity to do it in the service of peace, rather than the service of a side. Its violent imagery, however unpleasant, would be a strong stand for the individual against violence, and for human compassion against easily fanned hatreds

-- from The Violence Network by Eric Calderwood.

Some [of the graffiti] was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".

-- from 48 members of the Samouni family were killed in one day by Rory McCarthy

Bomber command

When someone gets near to one of the anecdotes I like to quote most from Freeman Dyson I sit up, and so it is with Menachem Kellner on five asymmetries in Israel’s Gaza war.

So it's disappointing to read that Kellner does not take Dyson's point to heart, but rather persists in a view which I think is mistaken. There is a basic superficiality in, for example, his third point ('green Israel bringing life' v. 'deathly Hamas in a desert'). Does he really not know that Israel has systematically made almost all economic activity in Gaza impossible? Does he not understand that the Israelis control and monopolise water supplies in both Israel proper and the occupied territories?

Slaves

says Juan Cole.

You have to wonder who's in charge here.