Category: Israel

The Gaza Strip: “It’s just that dystopian”

Max Blumenthal tells Glenn Greenwald:

“And for all I knew about the Israel-Palestine crisis, I was not prepared to come in to such intimate contact with so much human destruction. And to really come to grips with the fact that the Gaza Strip is an open-air prison, and it’s not hyperbolic to say so. We’re not just saying this for rhetorical effect.

In order to enter Gaza, you pass through the Erez terminal with your government press office credential, which means you’re one of very few people who can get in or get out. And you wander down a long corridor, which is a cage, and then you arrive at a metal door at a concrete wall. The metal door opens, it shuts behind you, and you’re inside what is effectively a walled-off ghetto.

You look down this endless wall, to your right, and you see a remote-controlled machine gun perched on the wall. That’s the spot and strike system, which is operated by an all-female unit of Israeli soldiers in the Negev Desert, tens of kilometers away, by remote. And what they do is, they watch the buffer zone?—?this 300-kilometer area that Palestinians are forbidden from entering inside the Gaza Strip. And anyone who enters who they determine to be a “terrorist,” they eliminate with the push of a joystick button from a remote-controlled machine gun. It’s just that dystopian.”

Essential Reading for Nakba Day

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By Murray Rothbard:

If you want to read a whole book, then:

Israel’s Repression of Nakba Day (May 15)

Tomorrow is Nakba Day, which commemorates the mass dispossession of Palestinians that accompanied the foundation of the State of Israel. Read “The more Israel represses the Nakba, the stronger the memories” by Gideon Levy in Haaretz. Use the printer-friendly or Google cache version to bypass the paywall.

“But the truth is that there is no greater proof of Israel’s insecurity about the justness of its cause than the battle waged to forbid marking the Nakba. A people confident in its path would respect the feelings of the minority, and not try to trample on its heritage and memories. A people that knows something terrible is burning under its feet sees every reference to what happened as an existential threat.”

For more details on Israeli repression of Nakba commemoration, see “Chilling effect of the Nakba Law on Israel’s human rights”

For more on Nakba Day itself, see “What is Nakba Day? A brief history” by Elon Gilad (printer-friendly, Google cache).

UPDATE: Also see Essential Reading for Nakba Day.

Back to Black and Back to the Stone Age

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You know how sometimes a cop will turn off his dash cam (often “mistakenly,” or it “malfunctions”) right before he brutalizes or executes a victim? That’s what Israel did yesterday, when it knocked out Gaza’s only power plant, killing the power for most of the population. This, besides its economic/humanitarian impacts, will make it much harder for Gazans to convey their plight to the rest of the world.  As smartphone and computer batteries run out, powerful, sympathy-inducing voices from Gaza, like that of the 16-year old Twitter-user Farah Baker (@Farah_Gazan), and the 10-year-old girl in this viral video, will be silenced. And as camera batteries die, we may see fewer heart-rending images of the carnage and wreckage that Israel’s pogrom is inflicting upon civilians, especially children.

Israeli government officials and their cheerleaders will welcome such a development, as one of their chief complaints in interviews has been the “unfair” impact that such images of, in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s words “telegenically dead Palestinians,” have had on world opinion. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, recently fretted that, “the pictures look terrible on the TV, and that immediately translates into diplomatic pressure on Israel to accept a far-less advantageous ceasefire.” Oren was particularly worried that the outrage over the images would lead to Israel having its (blood-soaked) “hands tied” by the UN Security Council.

After all, imagine if these pesky personal recording and communication devices had been around in 1947. If its massacres had been broadcast in real time, the Naqba might never have even gotten off the ground!

Surely, Netanyahu and Oren hope that the electricity black-out will result in an atrocity black-out. And with the “telegenically” dead conveniently made invisibly dead, the massacre might become “out of sight, out of mind” enough to world opinion, that Israel can secure a Carthaginian peace, with their precious starvation blockade of Gaza fully intact.

Leaving Gaza with no electricity, and therefore no running water or sewage treatment, also furthers another Israeli aim. Netanyahu has stressed the war objective of stripping Hamas of its rocket-firing ability. We’re not talking centrifuges and IBMs here. The Qassam rockets Hamas uses consist of little more than piping and fertilizer. So, the only way that an assault could make the creation of such primitive devices impossible would be by completely obliterating any remnants of technology and the division of labor left in Gaza: by bombing the Palestinians “back to the Stone Age” and destroying their infrastructure. A chilling expression of such a desire was given by Gilad Sharon, the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the Jerusalem Post in 2012:
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