Monday, 12 January 2009
TERRAVIVA United Nations Newsbriefs
Some Israelis Cry Out for Peace.

Daan Bauwens

TEL AVIV, Jan 11 (IPS) – Another peace rally Saturday night brought together about a couple of thousand Israelis to demand an immediate end to the ongoing assault in Gaza. The demonstration was held in front of the Hakirya, the central command of the Israeli Defence Forces and the Ministry of Defence in the heart of Tel Aviv.

This was the third peace rally in three weeks. The first was held directly after the first air bombing of Gaza. It was attended by a few hundred protesters. At the second, more than 2,000 people came out on the streets. “We have a humanistic and political message,” says Yosef Douek of the movement Peace Now which organised the demonstration. ‘Children in Gaza and Sderot want to live in peace and security. There is no use whatsoever to a continuation of these military actions.”

Peace Now was joined by Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, after the joint Palestinian-Israeli non-governmental organisation Alternative Information Centre made an appeal to make Jan. 10 “a huge global day of mobilisation against the Israeli war in Gaza.” “We are doing what we can to influence public opinion although I believe the effect of our actions is very limited,” says Yosef Douek. “Because we live in a country where media aren’t interested in breaking the political consensus. At the same time, the political approach to our message is non-existent. Everybody feels a patriotic urge to support the war, at least at this stage. I strongly believe this will change very soon. Public support will collapse, just as it did in previous wars.”

“This war started with a clear feeling of triumph,” says Ido Gideon, member of Meretz, a Jewish leftist party that supported the Israel Defensive Forces operation when it first began. “People in Israel thought that it would be a clean and fast operation to prevent Hamas from firing any more rockets at us. There was a clear feeling of vengeance amongst Israelis for what had happened that needed a response. Now things are getting out of hand, and vengeance has made place for disillusionment.”

But the group is finding it difficult to gain support both within Israel and internationally. “Whenever there is an Israeli military action, all leftists around the globe become anti-Israeli,” says Gideon. “All anti-war protests around the world are mingled with an anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish sentiment that is clearly aimed at the Jews’ right to live in this country. That makes it hard to be a leftist in Israel. Because in the first place, it isolates the whole of Israel, in the second place, it isolates the forces that are trying to change it.

“I am making the same battle as them,” Ido adds, “with one big difference: I’m making the battle inside of Israel. And whenever I go outside of Israel, I have to make another battle: the one of defending my right to be a Jew and live in this country.”

“The difference now with previous wars is the disproportionate use of violence, which has led to enormous anger in the rest of the world,” says Ronen Eidelman, an internationally known Jewish artist, writer and activist. He is engaged with linking art, culture and grassroots politics as editor of the online art and culture magazine Maarav, and is setting up several initiatives against the war in Gaza. “Last week we published a booklet with works of poets and artists against the war, which we distributed at the demonstrations. For some people, poetry is something they connect more to than an article in the newspaper.”
Israel at Crossroads Between Ceasefire and Occupation.
Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

JERUSALEM, Jan 11 (IPS) – Into the third week of its war on Gaza, Israeli leaders are convinced they’re still calling the shots. But, without a suitable diplomatic exit soon, the military “successes” could quickly begin to unravel, some sobering Israeli voices have cautioned.

Israel is disturbed that Thursday night’s UN Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire accords Hamas a degree of international legitimacy — even though Hamas is not explicitly mentioned in the resolution — and that “passage of the resolution,” wrote David Horovitz, chief editor of The Jerusalem Post in a front-page analysis, “will be seen in the frenzied climate of international debate as legitimating unbridled criticism (of Israel).”

But, Israeli confidence is reflected in the way it has shrugged off the resolution and in Israel’s readiness to bear the brunt of that international opprobrium for the desperate plight of the Gaza population. And, although Hamas rockets keep landing on southern Israel, Israeli insists it is not only tightening its military grip on Gaza but is inflicting crushing blows on the Hamas military wing.

“But now, Israel finds itself at a military and diplomatic crossroads — should they reap the dividends of the war thus far or risk taking it further and becoming embroiled in a final showdown with Hamas in the heart of Gaza’s populated areas,” says political commentator Leslie Susser. “The gung-ho advocates who want to destroy totally Hamas control of Gaza are feeding on their past dreams.”

The critical crossroads is starkly defined: either in the direction of speedily securing a diplomatic solution or, towards giving the Israeli army the green light to deepen the ground offensive which could last weeks, in the assessment of military sources.

Until now, conventional wisdom has been that the Israeli leadership was keen to avoid an extended operation in order to avoid a potentially embarrassing overlapping of the war with the installing of the new Obama administration in the U.S. But, says the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, Major-General Giora Eiland, “the army cannot go on like this forever. We need to reach a decision — either conclude a ceasefire in two to three days, or start a big military operation.” The third option — marking time with the same level of strikes against Hamas alongside on-off diplomatic efforts — is simply untenable, argue other defence experts.

In Israel’s policy-making circles, Egypt is perceived as the traffic cop at the crossroads. How it manages to steer the situation could solve Jerusalem’s dilemma of the days ahead. Cairo, in effect, is calling the shots.

In a televised speech from Damascus Saturday night, Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Meshaal said the Islamist group would not consider a truce until Israel ended its military offensive and lifted its crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip. But, Hamas delegations from both its Damascus-based politburo and Gaza, held talks in Egypt on Saturday, and on Sunday, Amos Gilad, head of the Israeli Defence Ministry’s political-security branch, was dispatched to Cairo for a second round of separate talks about concrete measures for getting an effective ceasefire in place.

It is through the tunnels under the Egyptian-Gaza border that Hamas has managed over the past few years to smuggle in its arsenal of long-range rockets and missiles. Israel wants Cairo to take full responsibility for stopping that traffic and for regulating their border in a way that there will be no possibility for Hamas to re-arm.

Before setting out, General Gilad was at pains to stress that “Israel is not pressuring Egypt;” he also praised Egypt’s logistical and security array as “eminently capable” of controlling the border.

A key parallel question is whether Israel will acquiesce in what, for its part, Hamas is seeking from Egypt — open and unmonitored borders between Gaza and Sinai and between Gaza and Israel. Israel is prepared for the Palestinian Authority (PA), backed by international experts, to monitor the border. However, PA President Mahmoud Abbas indicated clearly that his Authority would only be ready to be part of such an arrangement once its fences with Hamas have been mended.

This is the equation with which all sides are grappling. Israeli analysts say of Egyptian intentions that it’s not so much a question of bullying Egypt into border arrangements so much as that Hamas has not yet been bullied enough. They base themselves on remarks by some anti-Hamas Palestinians officials who privately express the hope of an eventual routing of Hamas.

For Israelis, ‘bullying Hamas enough’ raises the spectre of their war in Lebanon — not the war against Hizbullah in 2006, but the war on the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1982 when Israel went all the way to Beirut and forced then PA leader Yasser Arafat’s forces out of Lebanon, and tried to install a friendly Christian regime in Beirut. Any incipient thoughts about trying to repeat that in Gaza reportedly led Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak to mutter that anyone harbouring the illusion of toppling Hamas is hiding the fact that that would mean the re-occupation of Gaza.

At the start of this campaign, as in 1982, Israel’s deliberate ambiguity of purpose seemed to stand it in good stead. Now, though, the search for practical ways of implementing the Security Council provisions for a ceasefire is upping the pressure on Israel to lift the veil over the precise strategy it is pursuing – whether to curb Hamas’s hostile capabilities or try to smash it completely.
Gaza, and Israel’s Wars of Forced Regime Change.
Analysis by Helena Cobban

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (IPS) – The war that Israel launched on Gaza Dec. 27 is the seventh war of choice Israel has launched against its neighbours since 1973, the last year in which it fought a war that was forced upon it.

Of the seven wars one — in Lebanon, 1978 — had the goal of establishing an Israeli-controlled “security zone” running inside Lebanon’s border with Israel. The other six, including the present war on Gaza, all aimed at imposing a “forced regime change” on Arab communities neighbouring Israel through the violent physical dismantlement of politico-military structures then present in, or on occasion dominating, those societies. The five earlier attempts at forced regime change all had interesting — and quite unintended — consequences that might have given Israel’s leaders serious pause before they launched the present war.

The first of those “forced regime change” (FRC) wars was the one Ariel Sharon, as defence minister, planned and launched against the PLO’s structures in Lebanon in 1982. The PLO mounted a spirited defence. But after seven weeks of terrible destruction, pressure from their Lebanese allies forced the PLO leaders to agree to an internationally mediated ceasefire that mandated the evacuation of the entire PLO security force to distant Arab lands.

From a military viewpoint, Sharon’s war had “worked”. But it had two intriguing political-strategic consequences. Regarding Palestine, Palestinians in the occupied territories who previously had waited to be “saved” by PLO forces from outside realised after 1982 that they needed to work for their own liberation.

They launched their first intifada against Israel in 1987. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the IDF was left as a badly over-stretched occupation force, unable to counter the emergence of a new, indigenous Islamist-nationalist organisation that hadn’t even existed before 1982: Hizbullah.

In 1992, Hizbullah’s political wing ran in Lebanon’s parliamentary election, winning four seats and considerable additional legitimacy in national politics. The next year the IDF launched another FRC war in Lebanon, this time against Hizbullah. That war, the IDF was unable to win. It ended in a fairly fragile — because unmonitored — ceasefire.

In 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, worried about his chances in an impending Israeli election, ordered the IDF to try again. That FRC war was even less satisfactory for Israel. Hizbullah’s resilient military and mass-organisation structures withstood the IDF’s repeated attempts to bomb them into either annihilation or submission.

The IDF’s violence and the mass killings it inflicted proved politically counter-productive to Israel at both the Lebanese and international levels. After some weeks Peres had to agree to a ceasefire resolution in which the subsequent actions of both sides would be subject to international monitoring. The IDF returned to the “security zone” demoralised. (And Peres lost his election.)

Regarding Palestine, the first intifada had led to the Oslo Agreement which led to the establishment of a somewhat autonomous “Palestinian Authority” (PA) in the occupied Palestinian territories. Oslo also mandated that negotiations on a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace would be finished by 1999. As Israel stalled on those key negotiations and continued to plant settlers in the Occupied Territories, Palestinian frustration grew. In September 2000, the second intifada erupted.

That eruption was sparked when Ariel Sharon very provocatively entered Jerusalem’s holiest Islamic space, the Haram al-Sharif, accompanied by more than 1,000 armed police. By then, Sharon was leader of the opposition Likud Party, despite his earlier exclusion from high office in line with the recommendation of the Kahan Commission regarding his actions in the 1982 war in Lebanon. Elections were getting ever closer in Israel. They were held in February 2001. Likud won, and Sharon became prime minister.

In 2002, he ordered Israel’s fourth FRC war of the modern era. This one was against the PA’s structures in the Occupied Territories — both the security forces and those delivering social and economic services.

Sharon largely succeeded in smashing the PA’s infrastructure, but once again the political-strategic consequences proved counter-productive. Hamas, a militant Islamist-national group that Israel had once incubated, had always criticised the PLO for giving away too much in its never-ending peace talks with Israel. Now, with the PLO both incapacitated and humiliated, Hamas saw considerable new growth. In January 2006 it ran for the first time in PA legislative elections — and won.

Sharon had recently suffered a stroke. He was replaced by Ehud Olmert, a much younger figure who seemingly needed to prove his military toughness. In June 2006, Olmert unleashed another FRC war, this one against Lebanon’s Hizbullah. Hizbullah withstood that one, too. It, and the whole of Lebanon, suffered badly in 2006. But by the middle of 2008 Hizbullah’s political position in Lebanon was stronger than ever.

For his part, Olmert was badly damaged politically by the strategic ineptitude he and the IDF displayed in 2006. He clung to office, his power much diminished. At the end of 2008, as foreign minister Tzipi Livni and defence minister Ehud Barak were squaring off to fight each other and Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu in the February 2009 election, the Israeli cabinet decided on Israel’s sixth FRC war: this one against Hamas in Gaza.

The history of Israel’s FRC wars deserves close study. All have been “wars of choice” in that the “unbearable” situations that Israeli leaders have cited, each time, as giving them “no alternative” but to fight can all be seen as having been very amenable to negotiation — should Israel have chosen that path instead.

Also, all these wars were planned in some detail in advance, with the Israeli government just waiting for — or even, on occasion, provoking — some action from the other side that they could use as a launch pretext. All have received strong financial, rearming, and political support from the U.S., not least because they were waged in the name of counter-terrorism.

But the outcomes are important, too. At a purely military level, the two FRC wars against the PLO were the ones that Israel was able to “win”, in terms of being largely able to dismantle the structures it targeted. But the longer term, political-strategic outcomes of both those wars were distinctly counter-productive for Israel since they paved the way for the emergence of much tougher minded and better organised movements.

By contrast, Israel was unable to win any of its three FRC wars against Hizbullah. In each, Hizbullah withstood Israel’s assault long enough to force it into a ceasefire. All these wars ended up strengthening Hizbullah’s position inside Lebanese politics.

So how will Israel’s current attempt to inflict forced regime change on the Gaza Palestinians work out? If history is a guide, as it is, then this war will bring about either Hamas’s dismantling or a ceasefire on terms that will lead to (or at least allow) Hamas’s continued political strengthening.

A dismantling is unlikely, since Hamas’s leadership is located outside Gaza and has links throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds that ensure that annihilation of Hamas in Gaza would have serious global consequences. But if Hamas is dismantled in Gaza, it is most likely to be replaced there — faster or slower — by groups that are even more militant and more Islamist than itself.

Meantime, the high human costs of the war continue to mount daily.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.
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While above articles are well reasoned and deserve our attention, the last article in this series, in the UN sponsored TERRAVIVA is not – but let us show it here also and say that this article is the reason for all those other articles having been published by the IPS/UN joint venture. It is the intent to put the NGOs active at the UN in good light, but those NGOs – the so called International Human Rights Organizations –   are in effect the example of the World – Left that is both – anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli. They talk in effect of human rights except for the Jews. And this is what we object in the same way as the Israeli left is objecting. THE UN CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO BE A SPRINGBOARD TO THE DELIGITIMIZATION OF ISRAEL – A MEMBER OF THE UN IN GOOD STANDING – BUT FOR ALL THESE YEARS A UN WRONGED MEMBER OF THE UN BECAUSE OF THE INFLUENCE OF OIL MONEY AND OF THE RESIDUAL ANTI-SEMITISM PRESENT IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND IN TRADITIONAL ISLAM. Just look at the hailed Red Cross and Islamic Crescent organization – the Red Magen David rescue teams cannot even be a member – their symbol was anathema to its fabulous Swiss Calvinistic founders.

Let it be said clearly – UNRWA was not created to give backing to anti-Israeli fighter even when they take of their fatigues and hide in school buildings claiming they are civilians.   UNRWA, as much of the UN, are par of the problem why the Palestinian issue did not find a solution untill this day.

The evidence in this war is not out yet – but in the wars in Lebanon there was ample evidence that UN fighters were using the imunity of UN positions to shelter their missile launchers.

The article says that police is not Hamas – but the facts are that Hamas is ruling Gaza, all other forces have been eliminated so the armed police is just a branch of the armed HAMAS fighters. They are effective combatants.

What the Vatican representative means by concentration camp is an enigma, what did his predecesors think of the Nazi extermination camps in Catholic Europe?

The following UN self-serving article is of no help. The Palestinians and the world deserve better then what the Libyan, Egyptian, Pakistani, Indonesian … pressure group at the UN have put on our plate.

Aid Groups Dispute Israeli Claims in Gaza Attacks.
Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 (IPS) – As the Israelis try to justify the massive loss of civilian life in Gaza, their arguments and counter-charges continue to be shot down either by the United Nations or by international human rights organisations.

Did the Israelis misidentify a school run by the U.N. Relief Works Agency (UNWRA), where 43 Palestinians seeking shelter were killed in an early morning air strike? Or were there Hamas gunmen shooting from the school drawing Israeli fire? Neither assertion is accurate, says John Ging, UNRWA’s director of operations in Gaza. All U.N. schools in Gaza are clearly marked, and they fly the Organisation’s distinctly discernible blue-and-white flags.

Moreover, he told reporters, Israel has been provided with Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of all of UNRWA’s installations in Gaza. So there could not have been a misidentification of the U.N. school in the Jabaliya refugee camp whose compound was hit by an artillery shell early this week.

Asked if Hamas militants could have taken shelter in the school that was attacked, Ging said that UNRWA was “hugely sensitive” to maintaining the integrity of its facilities.

“We vet all those who seek shelter in our facilities to make sure militants were not taking advantage of them,” he said.

Ging said that after visiting the site, he was confident no militants had been inside the building at the time of the bombing and no fire had come from within.

However, he said, “Israel’s position on the issue had shifted to suggest that militant fire had come from the vicinity of the school rather than from inside.”

Still, Ging demanded an independent investigation to prove the U.N.’s credibility against the unfounded charges.

On Thursday, UNRWA was forced to suspend its relief work following the killing of one of its drivers and the wounding of another. They were in a clearly marked aid convoy.

Ging said that while the Israeli authorities had given clearance to U.N. aid workers to move around, “it is wholly and totally unacceptable that (Israeli) soldiers on the ground are firing on our aid workers.”

On Friday, however, UNRWA resumed its relief operations after the Israeli defence ministry provided “credible assurances” that U.N. personnel and humanitarian operations would be fully respected.

Told that Israeli officials were denying the existence of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes dismissed the denial by pointing out that the crisis was “worsening day by day”.

The appeals to halt the violence, he said, fell on deaf ears, both on the Israeli side and on the Hamas side.

According to the United Nations, the two-week old Israeli military operation in Gaza has killed 758 people, of whom 257 were children and 56 women, with 3,100 wounded, including 1,080 children and 452 women.

The staggering numbers were provided to the United Nations by the local Ministry of Health.

Although the United Nations could not independently verify the figures, Holmes told reporters “they appeared credible”.

In contrast, the total number of Israeli deaths, both military and civilian, was about 10, including by friendly fire, according to press reports.

At a news conference Wednesday, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, said Israel had attacked police stations in Gaza on the ground they were “combatants”.

“Police were not combatants and could not represent legitimate targets unless actively engaged in hostilities,” she pointed out. “It was Israel’s burden of proof to show the police they targeted were, indeed, Hamas militants.”

Instead, she said, it appeared that Israel had targeted police stations on a “blanket basis”.

Whitson said that only combatants actively engaged in fighting were legitimate targets of Israeli attacks.

Thus, a Hamas official at the Ministry of Health was not a legitimate target and neither was a Hamas media broadcasting station.

The situation in Gaza is so abominable that both the U.N. and international human rights organisations have refused to remain silent. Israel has been accused of violating both humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions on military operations.

In a letter to the U.N. Security Council Friday, the London-based Amnesty International (AI) called for firm action “to ensure full accountability for war crimes and other serious abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law”.

AI also urged the Council to dispatch international human rights monitors to Gaza and southern Israel to investigate and report on the continuing abuses by both warring parties.

Even the Vatican seemed outraged by the unmitigated violence by the Israelis.

Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, compared Gaza to a “concentration camp”, reminiscent of the horrors of a Nazi era — provoking anger from the Israelis.

“Look at the conditions in Gaza,” the Cardinal was quoted as saying, “more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp.”