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Gaza Massacre: by Salah Salah, january 7, 2009
The Texas Solution: by Ben Adam, january 7, 2009
Thoughts on Gaza: by Miko Peled, december 30, 2008
Where peace is a problem: by Haim Bresheeth,First publication in The Electronic Intifada, december 31, 2008

Gaza Massacres, by Salah Salah ( Beirut- Lebanon, January 7, 2009 )

The Israeli enemy has moved to the second stage of the barbaric attack on Gaza after finishing the first stage of air bombardment which continued for 9 days, and resulted in killing of hundreds of martyrs and caused a large number of casualties.

Throughout the first stage the Israeli occupation forces executed the following:

Destroyed the infrastructure of the government, and organizations related to Hamas including mosques, schools and universities.
Bombarded the leadership headquarters as well as houses of civilians which resulted in the death of complete families that were buried under the rubble.
Fired rockets at a lorry that was carrying gas bottles as well as a civilian car which resulted in the death of a women along with her four children, this led movement restrictions.
The Israeli forces targeted the ambulances and medical staff, and hence they were not able to rescue the casualties which remained under the rubble.
The markets were closed as a result of the continuous bombardment or due to lack of food storage and accordingly bakeries closed due to the insufficiency and flour.
Schools and universities were closed and some were even bombarded.
There was an electric disruption from some areas in the Gaza Strip.

I have managed to make phone calls and contact the wives of some of my friends and comrades and was told a very painful stories about their suffering and pain, some of which stories are:

Children's fear of continuous bombardment, lack of sleep and psychological effects of the shelling.
The continuous stress from mothers on their children and husband who are hiding because they are fighting with the resistance.
Families which stored food for emergency situations, since they were under the siege for the last six months were forced to use their storage.
The disruption of electricity makes people in Gaza spend their night in the dark and prevents them from watching the news and communicating with the outside world.

The second stage:

The situation is going to escalate and become more dangerous due to the participation of tanks from the ground and ships from the sea in order to invade three main areas in the Gaza strip :

The northern part which is located parallel to the Zionist settlements, this part was subjected to bombardment throughout the first nine days which proceeded the incursion.
The southern part which is parallel to the Egyptian borders (Rafah) in order to locate the tunnels and destroy them.
The centre of the strip aiming at isolating the city of Gaza and carry on with the destruction as well as monitoring the movement of the fighters.

The majority of the areas which was invaded by the tanks and military jeeps are not inhabited and consists of flat plains which make it difficult for the resistance to penetrate.

The main aim of the second stage (the ground incursion into the strip) as declared by the Israeli army leadership is the destruction of Hamas's infrastructure at the areas targeted by the operation as well as control over the areas where the rockets are being fired from.

The Israeli leaders feeling no shame from these massacres and inhuman attacks stated that they are going to carry on with the military operation until further notice to accomplish their aims.

Some of the Israeli media tools are leaking information that Tsipi Livni is attempting to achieve an agreement which includes the following:

Smuggling prevention through Sinai (Egypt) through a mutual Israeli- Egyptian plan where the United States of America plays a central role through providing consultants and engineers.
Issue a resolution by the Security Council regarding a ceasefire which includes the states (meaning Israel) right in defending itself when attacked.
Arrive to a regional agreement with Egypt regarding the closure of Rafah crossing unless according to the 2005 agreement, meaning with the PNA and under European supervision.

In any case Arab and international mediators started to move in order to stop the massacres committed by the Israeli forces and the most important of these countries are:

A Palestinian delegation headed by the Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas which was formed by the Arab Ministers in order to urge the Security Council to take a stand towards forcing Israel to stop its aggression on Gaza, if the delegation's attempt is not successful an Arab Summit is to be held.

There is no credibility for the Arab regimes as some of them are unable to take firm decisions, others are involved with Israel and USA, while others only condemns the massacres.

France through its president Sarkozy who failed to accomplish his aim from the beginning which he identified it as iobtaining promises and guarantees by Arab countries that Hamas would stop firing the rockets at the Israeli settlements. And accordingly he is not a mediator but he holds the Israeli point of view that was presented by Tsipi Livni in Paris.
Ardogan- the Turkish president- who seeks a particular aim, which is the formation of an agreement within the Arab Countries.
Egypt which insists to consider itself as a main side in the solution, and-accordingly proposes an initiative that includes: Immediate ceasefire, Opening of borders and crossing points, The presence of observers from the European Union and other countries to guarantee the application of the commitments of both sides.

The demands of the resistance in Gaza, which is legitimate and modest :

Stop this inhuman war and massacres in Gaza,
Lift the siege,
Open all the borders and crossings especially (Rafah

Israel however is lobbying towards imposing its own conditions based upon the following factors:

Its military superiority, the Israeli forces throughout ten days bombarded 1000 targets, 700 tons of explosives were destroyed as well as a massive number of houses, this resulted in the killing of 500 martyrs and 2500 casualties most of which are women and children, the forces also occupied certain locations in Gaza in order to use them for negations to achieve its aims.

The international official stand:

The Security Council held two sessions and it is expected that a third one would be held in the presence of Arab ministers, on the other hand it has failed to take a firm decision regarding the war on Gaza.
The United States of America justifies the inhuman invasion and massacres .
The European countries stand varied but in all cases it did not and would not impose any pressure on Israel; on the contrary some of them think that these massacres are justifiable.
Arab countries weak stand as Israeli leaders declared that some Arab countries encouraged them to launch the invasion and they are still urging Israel to carry on with its war on Gaza.
What is happening in Gaza targets all of its inhabitants and not only Hamas

The Palestinian side depends on the following :

The resistance’s ability to confront and tolerance in causing casualties within the Israeli military forces as well as the Zionist settlements inside the green line.
The tolerance of the Palestinian people inside the Gaza strip and their ability to accept the huge loss and suffering. We can confidently say, that based on previous experiences, Palestinians become united when they are exposed to external danger and they always overcome all the differences in opinions and arguments, in the battle field all of the factions are united in forming an operational room to defend the strip. And accordingly tanks and aircrafts can kill and bombard but they can't defeat the fighter's will and determination.

In spite of the intensity of the ground, sea and air attacks, the resistance are still capable to firing the rockets against Israel. During the first day of the attack the resistance has managed to fire 32 rockets, and according to an Israeli military spokesman 50 soldiers were injured amongst of which two were killed, one of them is a commandant, while the fighters in Gaza estimated the casualties to be higher than this as 84 settlers were taken to hospitals as result of a nervous breakdown from the fired rockets.

The international and Arab mass movement and demonstrations, such as the 2 million big demo that took place at the city of Rabat in Morocco and the 1 million demo in Istanbul- Turkey, as well as the 150 thousand huge demo that took place at the 1948 Palestine / Sakhnin, these mass movements as well as others are a live indicator that the Palestinian case is a just and fair case and all people who believe in human rights and freedoms are keen to defend it, it is also an indicator that the public opinion has realized that Israel is state of terror and is not concerned to make peace with the Palestinians.

These kinds of movement are necessary and important and shall sooner or later impose a pressure on the decision makers to support the resistance of the Palestinian people to achieve liberation, independence and right of return.

Speculations:

The Israeli forces will carry on with its aggressive attacks and will not stop committing massacres unless they arrive to an agreement where they believe can impose their own conditions.
In return the Palestinian resistance and tolerance will carry on until they accomplish the least extent of their demands: lifting the siege and opening the crossing points.
An agreement is going to be formulated, that addressed the demands of both sides but not within a short period of time, maybe after a long suffering for both sides, and this is when Israel will realize that it can't defeat the resistance and the Palestinian people in Gaza .

The Texas Solution, by Ben Adam ( January 7, 2009 )

The US evaluates the situation in the Middle East through racist and religious worldviews, and it is these views that form the ideological base of their support of Israel and help perpetuates the war on Palestinians.

It becomes apparent when we make a few simple mental substitutions. If we call the Israelis whites, and Palestinians Blacks, the picture clears up and is outlined in these black in white terms as a racial war. The whites are powerful and supported by other powerful white groups in an effort to assert and maintain dominance. The blacks are struggling against the oppression of the whites. Another substitution simplifies the picture further when we examine it through a religious prism. The Israelis belong to a Judeo-Christian bond and the Palestinians are Muslims who threaten it. The US and other allied power institutions of the western world prefers to define their victims in subhuman terms, as savages, barbaric or terrorists who are acting unreasonably from passion, hatred and revenge. It is easy for then to consider as they have the Native Americans, the Vietnamese and now the Iranians, Pakistanis, Iraqis and Palestinians as lesser beings, and wage an imperialist war on them disguised as a crusade for justice and peace.

The Palestinians defend their land with slingshots, rocks, and outdated weapons, and yet their fight is depicted in the mainstream media as equal in force to the Israeli army with its US supplied F16 warplanes, endless ammunition and cutting edge technology and weapons and a bankroll of billions. One must wonder, what it is that Israel is trying to achieve by its latest offensive on Gaza that leaves over seven hundred dead, half of them civilians, a third children? The Israelis tell the world that the goal of the operation is peaceful in essence and that they are trying to destroy Hamas, which they claim, is the real obstacle of peace. Say they succeeded in reaching their said goal. When they run Gaza to the ground, destroy civilian infrastructure, disable municipalities, starve, imprison, impoverish and kill innocence people, prevent medications and care for the sick, education for the young, when they rob them of human dignity and hope? Can they still talk of peace?

Without a doubt the American wars in Iraq and on the Taliban in Afghanistan have been total failures, as is Israel's war on the Hezbollah in Lebanon and its war on the Palestinians. No matter the media spins the only real plan the US and Israel have in the face of their shortcomings is to use more and more force. The US may play good cop to Israel's bad cop as they work together to break down resistance, but in reality Israel is acting as an imperialist military strong hold that threatens all other nations and people in the Middle East, and maintains the interest of the US as a dominant power in the region. This dichotomy between the propaganda and the true agenda of the US and Israel is no recipe for peace.

But I have a solution. It is the one who will resolve the situation more quickly and effectively then any other. It is an idea that will be can be easily accepted by all sides and is likely to enjoy enthusiastic worldwide approval. I will try now to outline it in broad strokes. The finer details can be worked out separately.

Israel is a small country, 8,000 sq miles in its present borders. Israel size can fit within the US 3.79 million square miles 444 times, in Texas alone it can fit 32 times. I suggest that the US allocate an area in Texas of about 8,000 sq miles and declare it the new Israeli state open to immigration to any Israeli citizen. The people of Israel will then face a choice of moving to the new Israeli state and become citizens of the US, or stay and become citizens of a new Palestinian state that will replace the outgoing Israeli state. As Palestinian Jews those who stay behind will enjoy all the rights and duties offered by the Palestinians to its citizenship. Those who move to Texas will enjoy all the rights and duties of a Texan. The US who has sang the praise of Israel for so long would benefit from the influx of the new immigrants. Simple.

You may think my idea ludicrous and absurd, but I invite you to walk the streets of Gaza and see for yourself what the ideas currently embraced by The US and Israel have amounted to. In the face of their complete failure my suggestion seems, if somewhat comical, much less sinister and fantastical.

The Texas Solution is not offered in earnest, but the need for a solution is no joke, and so I must indorse another who is the only real and true solution for lasting peace. One state for all Israelis and Palestinians, equal in rights, democratic, just and peaceful.

Ben Adam is an Israeli refuznik living in the US

Thoughts on Gaza, by Miko Peled ( December 30, 2008 )

As I sit and view the reports, photos and live videos streaming in from Gaza I find it impossible to make sense of it all. As a boy growing up in Israel and attending a regular public school, I remember being taught the story of Abraham, the patriarch arguing with God over the decision to destroy the city of Sodom. And Abraham stood before the lord. And Abraham drew near, and said: wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked, perhaps there be fifty righteous within the city, wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the righteous that are therein? ..and the Lord said, if I find in Sodom fifty just men within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes Genesis, 18, 23-26. One has to admire Abraham for his tenacity, arguing with God almighty for the sake of fifty men! Today I heard the argument made that only 50 innocent people were killed in this attack and I thought: God would have spared Gaza for those 50, but not Ehud Barak.

One has to admire the idea that no matter what, the life of innocent civilians is sacred and must never be compromised. There can be no doubt that among the 1.4 million people residing in Gaza there are more than 50 righteous men and women, but more importantly, there are 800,000 children in Gaza. According to reports in the Israeli newspapers hundreds of thousands of children were on their way to and from school at the time that 50 Israeli war-planes began a nine hour attack during which they dropped more than 100 tons of bombs.

With Israeli elections scheduled for February, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who is hoping to once again become Prime Minister, has once again unleashed the Israeli military on the civilian population of Gaza. Barak who has earned the dubious distinction of being Israel's most decorated soldier, is guaranteeing that Israelis and Palestinians will see more violence and more loss of innocent lives. With columns of tanks, and brigades of infantry ready to attack the already destroyed Gaza, Barak hopes to prove that he is a candidate that can deliver. But unlike the biblical story, there is no one willing to stand up to General Barak and argue for the lives of fifty righteous men, not to mention, eight hundred thousand children.

The 800,000 thousand children of Gaza were the reason that Nader Elbanna and I in our capacity as co chairs of the Elbanna-Peled Foundation, decided to travel to Gaza to deliver essential medical equipment to Ahli hospital in Gaza city. We flew from SD in mid November, passing through Europe, Israel and Jordan to Cairo; then traveling overland we crossed the Suez Canal, stopping at endless Egyptian security checkpoints along the way to reach the gates of Gaza at Rafah. It was there that we were told t hat the border to Gaza is closed. We spent three days trying to get in, with Nader arguing, negotiating passionately setting aside the excruciating pain from his ear and throat infection. In the end, standing merely 50 yards form our destination the truth came out of the mouth of one intelligence officer at the Rafah crossing who exclaimed: but we can't let you cross, the Israelis are watching.

We knew that an Israeli-Egyptian-American agreement was keeping the people of Gaza imprisoned, impoverished and malnourished but we hoped that with support and assistance we secured from Rotary in Egypt and other connections we could outsmart the system. The help we received was tremendous, but we had underestimated the system. Interestingly, the toughest part for us was not being denied entry, but rather it was calling Dr. Suheila Tarazi, of the Ahli hospital in Gaza and telling her that we would not be able to enter and deliver the equipment to the hospital. Dr. Tarazi thanked us for our efforts, described the intolerable conditions in Gaza and told us that with God's help we w ill all have peace one day. But the optimism and good wishes could not mask the grim reality evident in her voice. If the problems a doctor or a hospital administrator in Gaza had to face were insurmountable until a few days ago, now they are pure hell. As Israel shut off the electricity and shut down the supply of fuel, there is no refrigeration and medicines go bad and have to be discarded. Machines that need power to help people breath; dialysis and other life support machines stop working. Now with hundreds of casualties and little equipment or medicine one cannot imagine what it must be like for Dr. Tarazi and others who are entrusted with the lives of the sick and the injured.

The Elbanna-Peled Foundation, was founded in memory of two little girls who were victims of the Palestinian-Israel war: Smadar Elhanan, killed 1997 at the age of 13 when two Palestinians blew themselves up in Jerusalem, and Abir Aramin, killed at the age of 10 by an Israeli sniper in January 2007. The Gaza project was a third of its kind initiated by Nader Elbanna and I. Having met in a living room dialogue group in San Diego in the year 2001, our work together is done in an effort to demonstrate two points: Palestinians and Israelis are bound together by their ties to a mutual homeland and this bond can bring them together as allies; the second point is that an Israeli Palestinian alliance is a powerful tool that can transform the region and stop the bloodshed.

The question has been raised of whether or not the Israeli attack on Gaza is disproportionate to the threat that Gaza presents to Israel. The answer to that lies not in numbers, not in comparing how many rockets were fired or how many of the dead are actually Hammas people and how many were bystanders. The answer lies in the biblical Abrahams admonition towards God in Genesis 18: Far be it from thee to slay the righteous with the wicked.

Looking beyond the grim reality of today, I remember something that was written by another doctor from Gaza, Dr. Mona El Farra. In a piece published in the US about a year ago she wrote: This may seem an unlikely time to discuss the prospect of one state with equal rights for all, but the fighting in Gaza makes clear that a cordoned-off Gaza Bantustan is no solution. In response to this is wrote the following: The question that Dr. El Farra raises it monumental: Why is it right to speak of equal rights everywhere except for Israel and Palestine? Indeed, it may be an unlikely time but it is never the less the right time to discuss the establishment of a secular, democratic state in Israel/Palestine in which human and civil rights are guaranteed to all its citizens.

Miko Peled is an Israeli peace activist and writer living in San Diego.
For comments or contact please go to mikopeled.wordpress.com

Where peace is a problem, by Haim Bresheeth.
(First publication in The Electronic Intifada, December 31, 2008)

As the death toll in Gaza rises by the hour, and the few civic buildings still left are collapsing under the combined firepower of the Israeli air force, with its up-to-the-minute bombers and destructive armaments, we are again facing an incredible political phenomenon -- the foretold disaster which surprises all political leaders as if they, unlike the rest of us, never see a newspaper or watch the television news channels.

In Summer 2006, after months of Israeli hints that it was going to move into Lebanon and finish off Hizballah, world leaders were also too busy and quite shocked; to be precise, they were "shocked" for a whole month, a month of wanton destruction and killing, exactly until Israel needed a ceasefire urgently, as things were not going according to plan.

Then, all of a sudden, western nations moved overnight to impose a cease-fire. Even so, they failed to help Israel in its mission of destroying Hizballah. So, while only people with no easy access to their moral fiber can go on claiming that Israel is right in its murderous, barbaric and illogical revenge mission to hell, the real question is, how are they allowed to do it, and always get away with it?

After 40 years of brutal occupation, with every item of countless UN resolutions and the Geneva Conventions violated, with tens of thousands dead in countries surrounding Palestine, not to mention in Palestine itself, after numerous peace agreements, initiatives, drives, road maps and Nobel Prizes, we are still where we were 40 years ago, but in a much worse scenario.

Surely this could not be happening, yet it is, and it will continue to happen, dragging more and more of world politics into the quagmire of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has now turned into the World vs. Palestine conflict, it seems. Now this could never happen, unless world leaders were closing their eyes to it -- staunchly, continuously, devotedly and methodically, and for decades.

So what are they doing now, when Israel moves, again, against one and a half million Palestinians, after having starved them for almost two months? After having denied them any chance of work, food, medicine, fuel, electricity or water? What are the leaders of the democratic world, Bush, Brown, Berlusconi or Sarkozy -- all sworn supporters of Israel -- doing now? What have they learned from the last hundred or so Israeli incursions into Gaza? From the continued cyclical destruction of Lebanon, every time an Israeli prime minister feels he needs to boost his standing?

One might well ask, when thinking about those leaders of the Free World, what they have learnt from Vietnam, or Nicaragua, or Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan conflicts, in which they were involved, ever-so-carefully? The truth is that the west has never managed to learn from either its colonial and imperial past, or from its ongoing blunders and war crimes in the present. The only variable seems to be the amount of force -- one always can resolve the conflict, it is just a matter of applying enough force, isn't it?

The Soviets also believed that given enough force, they could defeat Afghanistan, and so do some western politicians, though it seems that many are now wise to the fact that it is not going very well recently. Israel has been using this retarded policy for six decades -- if you fight everyone around, and make sure you are the strongest military force in the Middle East, then you can do what you wish; this was supposed to lead somehow to peace and quiet, yet it always fails. Yes, Israel can destroy the whole Middle East and much more, but, and this is curious, it cannot have peace of any kind with the Palestinians. How are we to understand this contradiction?

Well, to begin with, Israel has never looked for peace with the Palestinians; it only looked for means to depopulate and empty the country, ever since its founding in May 1948. It exiled 750,000 Palestinians from their land, made them refugees, and then systematically refused them and their descendants entry despite UN resolutions, while destroying their villages and towns, or building Israeli Jewish towns on top of them. Since 1967 it has done all any country could do, to make a political solution impossible, by illegally settling in the occupied territories, and by refusing to go back to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines, by building the Apartheid wall, and by generally making life impossible for most Palestinians. This is not an effort for peace -- more likely, this is an effort for continuous and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

So, if peace is a problem, as it will by definition mean losing the mini-empire built by Israel, then one does what one can to avoid it, even it is offered on a plate, like in the Saudi Peace Initiative, which Israel's leaders, supposedly in waiting for exactly such an offer, scorned and refused. This denial of the potential for peace has been going on for so long, most Israelis have failed to notice it as it turned into second nature.

But the more terrifying reason why no peace initiative has ever had the slightest chance has indeed to do with us in the west. Israel has been supported by the western democracies as their bulwark in the Arab East, more dependable than client regimes such as the Saudis or Iraq's Saddam until 1990. As a strong proponent of the Huntingtonian thesis of the Clash of Civilizations, Israel is still, on a covert if not an overt level, the bastion of the Judeo-Christian world against the Arabs and Islam. This was true some decades ago, but has never been truer than in the last decade, with the New World Order of continued crisis, of the Shock Doctrine, of Shock and Awe, of repeated storms in the deserts of Asia, always Islamic.

Israel, not Iran, possesses nuclear weapons, and is also capable of using them, and threatens to do so, yet it is Iran who is the culprit. The proponents of attacking that country are the same merchants of doom who have sold us the war in Iraq. Imagine for a moment what a Muslim in Britain might feel, if he stopped to think about a world in which the main culprits, "terrorists," extremists and insurgents are always said to be Muslims, and are everywhere being hunted by the great forces of international "law and order," mainly led by the so-called Free World? Is it so surprising that a tiny number of British born and bred Muslims found it acceptable to explode bombs in the capital? Is the solution to this loaded and explosive situation to kill more Muslims, to alienate more Muslims?

One thousand years after the beginning of the Crusades, one is tempted to ask if it is not time to close the book, to call it a day, to bury the hatchet and start talking? And, to be sure, there can be no talking as long as the Free World sticks with the Israeli method of conflict resolution -- bomb them to smithereens, then you don't need to talk to them, and if you need to talk to them, they will talk differently when bombed out of existence.

How long will we support destruction as a platform for dialogue? Has it ever worked anywhere?

Prof. Haim Bresheeth is Chair of Media Studies at the University of East London, and the co-editor of The Gulf War and the New World Order.