Posted by: quiscus | January 10, 2009

January 10, 2008

1.  So Israel is doing to Gazans what the Nazis did to Jews:

“Dead Gaza fighters “bulldozed into piles”

A Palestinian man captured by Israeli troops in Gaza said after his release on Friday that he had seen the corpses of many Islamist fighters bulldozed into piles covered with sand.

http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/01/09/dead-gaza-fighters-bulldozed-into-piles/

2.  No kidding:

“The best explanation for why Israel is on weak ground in its current operation appeared as a letter to the editor at the New York Times. Columnist Nicholas Kristoff had written that “Israel’s right to do something doesn’t mean it has the right to do anything.”

Note that I am not alleging, and neither is the letter writer, that Israeli troops are deliberately killing civilians. I am alleging that Israeli troops don’t care very much if they happen to kill civilians while getting at what they think of as Hamas targets. They are not doing due diligence to avoid civilian deaths and casualties.

The difference between Israeli military action in Gaza and most US operations in Iraq is not a matter of national character or some other essentialist attribute. It is the difference between imperial occupation for specific purposes and settler colonialism. The Israelis are both an army and a settler movement. The US never considered flooding Iraq with colonists from Alabama and Mississippi.

When threatened by an indigenous population trying to expel it, settler colonialism is vicious. It is after all facing an existential threat. The US can withdraw from Iraq with no dire consequences to the US. In 1954-1962, the French killed at least half a million, and maybe as much as 800,000 Algerians, out of a population of 11 million. That is between nearly 5 percent and nearly 10 percent! The French military had been enlisted to fight for the interests of the colonists, who were in danger of losing everything. (In the end they did lose almost everything, being forced to return to Europe, or choosing to do so rather than face the prospect of living under independent Algerian rule).

The brutality with which the British put down the Mau-Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s is another example of massive human rights violations on behalf of a settler population.

This latest sanguinary episode is a further manifestation of Israel’s insecure brand of settler colonialism, in which the lives of the indigenous population are viewed as worthless before the interests of the colonists. The Israelis have not killed on the French scale, but I would argue that they kill, and disregard civilian life, for much the same reasons as the French did in Algeria.

Settler colonialism is unstable in the contemporary world because of the facilities subject populations have for mobilization and resistance. Conflict between colonizer and colonized has only ended in one of three ways: 1) The expulsion of the colonists, as in Algeria; 2) the integration of the colonists into a nation that includes the indigenous population, as happened in South Africa; or 3) the expulsion of the indigenous population, as with the Trail of Tears in the nineteenth-century United States.

http://www.juancole.com

3.  Oh, this is classy behavior:

“Israel Attacks UN Aid Convoys to Gaza

More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to the most recent estimates. The UN has estimated that 25 percent of Palestinian deaths have been women and children, with an addition unknown number of men who were also civilians.

Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor working in the Gaza Strip, when asked by a reporter whether Hamas militants were included amongst those arriving at his hospital for treatment, replied, “I’ve seen one military person among the tens of…I mean, hundreds we have seen and treated. So anybody who tries to claim this is sort of a clean war against another army are lying. This is an all out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11728

Advertisement

Responses

  1. I want both sides to quit shooting each other, but the only thing that is heard in any media outlet is how Israel is bombing Gaza and killing women and children. The world is only getting half of the story. Hamas, which happens to be the elected representation for Gaza and the Palestinians, has been lobbing rockets into Israel for years, killing innocent women and children. Israel has restrained herself for years while attempting to negotiate peace, has given up land, and compromised at every turn. Yet the duly elected representatives of Gaza and the Palestinians elect to continue “poking the bear.” What’s worse, when Hamas awakens the bear they hide behind their women and children placing them at risk. There is video proof of this. Most recently they were witnessed launching rockets from a school roof top which was subsequently bombed in retaliation.

    Again, as a Christian I want peace. However, NEITHER side can be expected to sit back and be attacked over and over again with no effort to protect themselves.


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Categories

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.