ARTICLES

ARI SHAVIT: HAMAS ARE PALESTINIAN NEO-NAZIS

In this sad war story, Israel is in the right
Those who are even slightly forgiving of Hamas are cooperating with a fanatically religious tyrannical dictator. Hamas are Palestinian neo-Nazis.
By Ari Shavit
Haaretz
July 24, 2014

www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.606865#

When the fighting ends, they’ll start to ask difficult questions. Did Israel do everything in its power to utilize the many years of relative calm to advance the peace process? Was the United States careful not to leave a vacuum in place when the Kerry initiative failed? Did Israel’s security establishment accurately estimate the raw threat presented by Hamas, and the possibility that it would resort to conflict? Did Israeli society provide the Israel Defense Forces with the backing that it needed in order to sufficiently prepare for war? Did the bug of political correctness drive the far-left crazy? Did the blood and suffering of the last few weeks make Israeli democracy closed-minded and intolerant?

When the time comes, all of these questions will require not-so-simple answers.

But now, as soldiers are being attacked from all directions, there are other, more basic questions that must be asked. Who are we fighting? What are we fighting for, and are we justified?

Who are we fighting? A fascist organization that terrorizes the people of Gaza, oppresses women and gays, and shuns all democratic values of freedom and progress.

Those who are even slightly forgiving of Hamas are cooperating with a fanatically religious tyrannical dictator. Amos Oz spoke about Israeli neo-Nazis? Hamas are Palestinian neo-Nazis. They’ve turned the first strip of Palestinian land that was granted (relative) freedom into a bastion of totalitarianism. They’ve incessantly attacked Israel for roughly a decade. They staunchly rejected every Israeli attempt to prevent the current escalation. They stubbornly fired thousands of rockets at civilians.

They’ve employed a sophisticated yet malicious strategy, which has two goals: to kill innocent Jews and force the IDF to kill innocent Palestinians. The murderous terrorist organization that took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, while executing many of its own people, is an organization of war criminals. By no means can they be allowed to win this difficult conflict, and by no means can we show any empathy for the evil they represent.

What are we fighting for? Our home. The Jewish people was a people without a home, who managed the impossible, and created a home for itself. The State of Israel is a miracle. We must not give up this miracle. We must not endanger it, and we must not take its existence for granted. When dark forces try to annihilate it, we must defend it. When hypocritical, self-righteous forces try to weaken it, we must make it stronger. We are surrounded by a new threat of Muslim Arab chaos. Enemies seeking our blood amass at our walls.

What the Israel Air Force pilots are doing right now is allowing the only Jewish state to exist. What Golani, Paratroopers, and Nahal soldiers are doing right now is ensuring that the only democracy in the Middle East will survive. Israelis living in the south are currently facing a diabolical effort to bring our house down over our heads. Even as the images coming out of Gaza are extremely difficult, we cannot forget this. We are not Goliath. We were David, we remain David, and as David, we defend ourselves.

Are we justified? Clearly. We’ve made terrible mistakes – politically, strategically and militarily. We were complacent and arrogant, and walked into traps with open eyes. But don’t get confused, friends. Don’t cross the lines, friends. We must stand strong against the evil tunnels and the wicked rockets that threaten us. We’ve forgotten how to say it, and sometimes it’s difficult to whisper it, but we’re right. In this sad, terrible story, we’re in the right. What we must do over the coming days is be smart, as well.

 

ISRAEL CONSIDERS TURNING TO UN SECURITY COUNCIL

Israel looks to Lebanon model for Gaza endgame
Doubting a cease-fire can be reached through Egypt’s mediation, Israeli officials consider turning to UN Security Council.
By Barak Ravid
Haaretz
July 23, 2014

Two weeks into the war in Gaza no ceasefire is yet on the horizon. The diplomatic shuttling between representatives of the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Norway and the UN Secretary General, as well as some European Union countries, has so far not yielded any outline for stopping the fighting. In fact, the opposite is true: Too many chefs have spoiled all the broths prepared so far.

Israel is in a bind. Hamas is not interested in a ceasefire. Monday’s meeting in Doha between Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ended in failure. Meshal is in total euphoria since the hostilities in Gaza began. The more he is wooed, the more encouraged he becomes to harden his positions. He wasn’t flustered at the meeting and rejected all of Abbas’s proposals.

More and more cabinet ministers and senior officials are becoming convinced that the pattern we were accustomed to on previous occasions, whereby Hamas and Israel deal with each other indirectly through Egypt, producing some kind of ceasefire agreement, won’t work this time. A different exit strategy needs to be found, one that Hamas will find difficult to veto.

One idea making the rounds in the defense establishment, the foreign ministry and among experts in think tanks with direct links to the Prime Minister’s and Defense Minister’s bureaus is to recreate the exit plan from the second Lebanon War. According to this idea, Israel, in coordination with the US and other allies, as well as with Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League, will propose a Security Council Resolution, similar to Resolution number 1701 which ended that war in 2006.

Beyond a ceasefire, that resolution was intended to advance Israel’s diplomatic objectives such as the strengthening of Lebanon’s government’s hold on its southern district, the international isolation of Hezbollah, the demilitarization of southern Lebanon from rockets and heavy weaponry and the stationing of international observers on the border. Resolution 1701 was a continuation of the earlier Resolution 1559, which called for the disarming of Hezbollah and other armed militias in Lebanon.

The same principles could serve Israel’s diplomatic goals in the days following the fighting in Gaza. A UN resolution to end the hostilities should include the following principles:

a) A declaration that the lawful government in Gaza is that of the Palestinian Authority under President Abbas. Implicitly, this will oblige Israel to work with the Palestinian unity government.

b) A redeployment of Palestinian Authority forces along Gaza’s borders and at border crossings into Israel and Egypt.

c) Erection of a mechanism that will ensure demilitarization of the Gaza Strip from rockets, tunnels and heavy weapons, along with the sending of UN inspectors to different locations throughout the Strip. These inspectors will report back to the Security Council every 3-6 months. Even if not a single rocket is dismantled, this problem will be brought to the forefront of world attention.

d) A meaningful change in Israel’s policies with regard to border crossings, particularly concerning the passage of people and goods between Gaza and the West Bank.

e) A lifting of the naval siege and the construction of a deep water harbor under the supervision of the Palestinian Authority and a strong international force.

f) The rehabilitation of Gaza’s economy and infrastructure under international supervision that will prevent the diversion of building materials to the construction of bunkers and tunnels by terrorist organizations.

Resolution 1701 which ended the second Lebanon war wasn’t perfect. Actually, Benjamin Netanyahu was one of its harshest critics. Many of its sections have not been implemented to this day, yet it gave Israel many diplomatic advantages while isolating Hezbollah.

A similar resolution with respect to Gaza will also not be fully implemented. Hamas will surely oppose it. However, given its current condition it will find it hard to object to it, particularly if it is backed by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. This solution is far from perfect but all other options are worse.

 

COULD ARTIFICIAL ISLAND SOLVE GAZA PROBLEM?

Could artificial island solve Gaza problem?
Minister proposes giving Gaza a port, airport – without compromising on Israel’s security.
By Shimon Cohen
Israel National News
July 23, 2014

Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz has unveiled a proposal that he believes could allow Israel to fully disengage from Gaza, without compromising its security.

“For years, I have been calling for a ‘civilian disengagement’ plan. Stop providing electricity, water, gas, food, and all kinds of other things, demilitarize Gaza – no missiles and tunnels – and create a border between Israel and Gaza,” he explained.

Instead, he said, Gaza should have its own airport and port – but with special arrangements.

“We should open the Rafiah crossing between Gaza and Egypt for an intermediate period, for goods and people to pass through, with supervision,” he said.

“At the same time, we should initiate the creation of an artificial island at sea, under international supervision and with international funding, roughly 4.5 kilometers off the Gaza coast,” he continued. A model for the project has already been created, he noted.

“On the island there will be a port, a power plant and water treatment plant, and eventually an airport. There could be hotels there, too. The island would be connected to Gaza by a bridge, which would have a security checkpoint in the center.

“[The checkpoint] would be under full international control for 100 years, and under Israeli control at sea,” he suggested. “The Palestinians would be part of operating the port and airport, and staffing the hotels.”

“There would be no homes on the island,” he added.

If the condition of Gaza’s demilitarization were violated, he said, the crossing and the security checkpoint could be shut down. Israel would retain the option of responding to any cross-border fire.

“In order to allow this to be implemented, Israel must set the demilitarization of Gaza as a clear objective for Operation Protective Edge,” he warned.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in the 2005 Disengagement, but continues to supply the region with water, electricity, and other supplies, and retains control of the sea some distance off the coast of Gaza. Under agreements reached during the Disengagement, international observers were to man the Egypt-Gaza crossing and ensure that weapons did not enter Gaza; however, the observers fled following the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2006, and the agreements were later ignored.

 

“THE NEW YORK TIMES’ CHOICE OF PHOTOS IS AS ONE-SIDED AND MISLEADING A DEPICTION OF THE GAZA BATTLE AS ONE CAN IMAGINE”

My piece for the National Post on the media coverage of Gaza was cited in the following article on the New York Times website.

***

War and Media in the Gaza Strip
By Jake Flanagin
July 22, 2014
New York Times

http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/war-and-media-in-the-gaza-strip/

Alleged gunfire at an Al Jazeera bureau in Gaza on Tuesday was hardly a boon to the Israeli Defense Forces’ public image – and this was only the latest installment in a string of P.R. debacles facing the Jewish state.

The current conflict in Gaza is playing out on two fronts: one on the ground, spilling more and more blood with each passing day; the other glowing on television screens and flitting across Twitter feeds around the world. A sampling from the latter:

Commentators and media spin, observers say, are having a unprecedentedly profound impact on global perceptions of Operation Protective Edge. “Propaganda wars have unfolded alongside the battlefield for generations,” writes Judi Rudoren for The New York Times. “But analysts said the latest flare-up between Israel and the Gaza Strip has brought a new level of dehumanizing, hateful language and a muddying of official talking points with incendiary threats.”

“The Gaza-based interior ministry advises its supporters in a YouTube video that whenever talking about the dead, ‘always add ‘an innocent citizen,’’” Ms. Rudoren reports. “In Israel, the message is quite different: Those same victims are described as ‘human shields’ sacrificed by the ‘heartless’ Hamas ‘terrorists’ that rule Gaza.”

It’s a conflict of rhetoric, in which many are beginning to believe Israel and its supporters are losing ground. In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Israeli Prime Minister complained that Hamas was intentionally putting civilians in harm’s way as part of a campaign to elicit sympathy from foreign audiences. “They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause,” he said.

The phrase “telegenically dead Palestinians” promptly erupted across broadcast and online media:

Writing for The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald pointed out the ironic similarities between Mr. Netanyahu’s comment and the grievances one Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich, aired in a 1941 essay published in his weekly newspaper, Das Reich. Mr. Goebbels wrote:

“The Jews gradually are having to depend more and more on themselves, and have recently found a new trick. They knew the good-natured German Michael in us, always ready to shed sentimental tears for the injustice done to them. One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable. They may confuse some harmless souls for a while, but not us. We know exactly what the situation is.”

At New York Magazine, meanwhile, Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that “if Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them.” If anything is to be gleaned from such substantial losses in Gaza, Mr. Wallace-Wells argues, it is perhaps a shift in American attitudes toward Israeli policy: “I think the way the last two weeks have unfolded in the Western media has made it more difficult for Americans not personally invested in the conflict to simply assume that the Israelis are necessarily right.”

And yet others attribute this shift to a reportorial imbalance. The Weekly Standard’s Noah Pollak finds photographic coverage of the conflict in The Times to be particularly objectionable: “A review of The Times’s photography in Gaza reveals a stark contrast in how the two sides are portrayed. Nearly every picture from Israel depicts tanks, soldiers or attack helicopters. And every picture of Gaza deceits either bloodied civilians, destroyed buildings, overflowing hospitals or other images of civilian anguish. It is as one-sided and misleading a depiction of the Gaza battle as one can imagine.”

The National Post’s Tom Gross agrees. Western media have been anything but evenhanded in their coverage of this conflict, he claims: “Indeed the BBC, along with most of the international media, have failed to tell us that quite a number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza were the result of misfired Palestinian rockets. Last week alone, at least 100 Hamas rockets accidentally hit targets within Gaza.”

Additionally, Mr. Gross stipulates that Western media are actually less critical of Hamas than their counterparts in the Arab world. “On Egyptian TV, several commentators said they were ‘sick and tired’ of Hamas,” he writes. “There have been similar sentiments in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and even in the Fatah-controlled West Bank. So the next time 5,000 rowdy demonstrators take to the street to protest Western media’s supposed ‘pro-Israel’ bias, they might want to keep in mind the history, the facts and what Arab media are saying about Hamas.”

An armed conflict may be a poor place to seek out an evolution in sophisticated media consumption, yet it’s impossible to ignore this fact: Discernment among media consumers has grown in tandem with the number of media outlets available to them, including the disintermediating networks of social media. Writing for Britain’s Channel 4 News, Paul Mason recalls a the famous photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl “lacerated by a U.S. napalm strike in 1972.” Audio tapes of President Richard Nixon and White House chief-of-Staff Bob Haldeman discussing the photo recorded the two postulating that the image may have been “fixed.”

“Today, anybody wishing to bomb civilians, or risk civilian casualties in a military operation, can tell quite quickly what is fake and what is real,” Mr. Mason writes. “And so can the population that elects them.”

 

“THE MESSAGE THAT ALL THIS MORALLY PORNOGRAPHIC PROMOTION OF IMAGES AND REPORTS OF PALESTINIAN DEATH SENDS TO HAMAS IS THIS: VICTIMHOOD WORKS”

Your pity for Palestinians is making things worse in Gaza
By Brendan O’Neill
Western thirst for images of the dead could be contributing to the bloodshed.
Spiked
July 24, 2014

In the war of words over the war between Israel and Hamas, one question is asked time and again: why does Hamas put the civilians of Gaza in harm’s way? Hamas at least stands accused by some of encouraging Palestinians to act as human shields against the rockets from Israel and storing weaponry in civilian buildings. This week the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees reported the discovery of Hamas rockets in a vacant school, in between two buildings housing 3,000 displaced Palestinians. Certainly when Palestinians are killed, Hamas’s leaders swiftly organise photo opportunities for foreign observers, giving rise to a situation where, in one journalist’s words, ‘wounded and dead women and children [are paraded] in front of the cameras’. The Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu caused a storm when he referred to these unfortunate souls as ‘telegenically dead’ Palestinians, publicly displayed by Hamas to ‘garner international sympathy’.

Various explanations have been offered for Hamas’s alleged endangering of Palestinian life. It does it because it is cynical, wicked, so determined to depict Israel as the monster of the Middle East that it’s actually pleased when Gazans get killed, commentators claim. But there is something else, too, another side to this sordid story, another aspect to these allegations about Hamas’s complicity in, or lack of care about, the rising death toll in Gaza. And that is the question of what urge, what audience, Hamas is allegedly trying to satisfy with its imagery of dead Palestinians. The answer is us, individuals in the West who cannot get enough of horror stories of Palestinian victimhood, campaigners and journalists over here who now barter in gory images of killed Palestinians and who promote and share such images both to demonstrate their own emotional intelligence and to put pressure on international institutions to rein in Israel and recognise Palestinian statehood.

That is, it’s all well and good to criticise Hamas for its supply of images of ‘telegenically dead’ Palestinians, but we also need to interrogate the demand side to this relationship, the thirst that exists here in the West for graphic proof of Palestinian victimhood, and the way in which this demand might, perversely, be contributing to the bloodshed in Gaza. Is it possible that modern-day Palestinian solidarity campaigns, which now almost exclusively use images of victimised Palestinians as leverage against Israel in international forums, are implicitly inviting the Palestinian leadership itself to provide more such images, and possibly more dead?

Hamas’s suspected endangerment of civilian areas of Gaza is not taking place in a vacuum. It’s occurring at a time when imagery and reports of Palestinian suffering have extraordinary clout, becoming a kind of currency in international media and campaigning circles. The Western appetite for pictures of and information about Palestinian suffering is vast. Media outlets and pro-Palestinian campaigners count and even name every Gazan killed in rocket attacks. The hashtag #GazaUnderAttack has become one of the busiest on Twitter, being used hundreds of thousands of times to share graphic images of dead Palestinians. Some newspapers have broken their own taste guidelines in order to publish photographs of dead children. When an Israeli rocket hit a beach and horrifically killed four children, images of the kids’ dead bodies were widely shared, one of the surviving boys was interviewed on primetime news shows, and anti-Israel memes were created calling on outsiders to do something to stop Israeli militarism.

The message that all this morally pornographic promotion of images and reports of Palestinian death sends to Hamas is this: victimhood works. The feverish Western marshalling of emotive imagery of Palestinian corpses to the political end of seeking sanctions against Israel or greater international protection for the Palestinian territories surely has the effect of encouraging Hamas to try to provide more of the same, more ‘telegenically dead’ Palestinians. There is a logic to Hamas’s alleged encouragement of great risk among the Gazan civilian population and certainly to its ‘parading’ of dead bodies before the press: it’s a response to the grotesque Western fashion for looking at, sharing and using as political tools images of dead Palestinians. Hamas is best seen as kind a drug pusher to those in the West who have developed a very ugly habit of exploiting images of brutalised Palestinians both for their own needs (to advertise their emotional awareness) and for political purposes (to exert pressure on our leaders to condemn Israel).

ARTICLES

“WE HAVE WITNESSED ANTI-ISRAEL SENTIMENT BECOMING MORE VISCERAL, MORE EMOTIONAL, MORE UNHINGED THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN”

There’s something very ugly in this rage against Israel
By Brendan O’Neill
Spiked magazine (UK)
July 15, 2014

www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/theres-something-very-ugly-in-this-rage-against-israel

Why are Western liberals always more offended by Israeli militarism than by any other kind of militarism? It’s extraordinary. France can invade Mali and there won’t be loud, rowdy protests by peaceniks in Paris. David Cameron, backed by a whopping 557 members of parliament, can order airstrikes on Libya and British leftists won’t give over their Twitterfeeds to publishing gruesome pics of the Libyan civilians killed as a consequence. President Obama can resume his drone attacks in Pakistan, killing 13 people in one strike last month, and Washington won’t be besieged by angry anti-war folk demanding ‘Hands off Pakistan’. But the minute Israel fires a rocket into Gaza, the second Israeli politicians say they’re at war again with Hamas, radicals in all these Western nations will take to the streets, wave hyperbolic placards, fulminate on Twitter, publish pictures of dead Palestinian children, publish the names and ages of everyone ‘MURDERED BY ISRAEL’, and generally scream about Israeli ‘bloodletting’. (When the West bombs another country, it’s ‘war’; when Israel does it, it’s ‘bloodletting’.)

Anyone possessed of a critical faculty must at some point have wondered why there’s such a double standard in relation to Israeli militarism, why missiles fired by the Jewish State are apparently more worthy of condemnation than missiles fired by Washington, London, Paris, the Turks, Assad, or just about anyone else on Earth. Parisians who have generally given a Gallic shrug as French troops have basically retaken Francophone Africa, stamping their boots everywhere from the Central African Republic to Mali to Cote d’Ivoire over the past two years, turned out in their thousands at the weekend to condemn Israeli imperialism and barbarism.

Americans who didn’t create much fuss last month when the Obama administration announced the resumption of its drone attacks in Pakistan gathered at the Israeli Embassy in Washington to yell about Israeli murder. (Incredibly, they did this just a day after a US drone attack, the 375th such attack in 10 years, killed at least six people in Pakistan. But hey, Obama-led militarism isn’t as bad as Israeli militarism, and dead Pakistanis, unlike dead Palestinians, don’t deserve to have their photos, names and ages published by the concerned liberals of Twitter.) Meanwhile, hundreds of very angry Brits gathered at the Israeli Embassy in London, bringing traffic to a standstill, clambering on to buses, yelling about murder and savagery, in furious, colourful scenes that were notable by their absence three years ago when Britain sent planes to pummel Libya.

Such are the double standards over Israel, so casually entrenched is the idea that Israeli militarism is more bloody and insane than any other kind of militarism, that many Western liberals now call on their own rulers to condemn or even impose sanctions against Israel. That is, they want the invaders and destroyers of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere to rap Israel’s knuckles for bombing Gaza. It’s like asking a great white shark to tell off a seal for eating a fish. America must ‘rein in Israel’, we are told. ‘The international community should intervene to restrain Israel’s army’, says a columnist for the Guardian, and by ‘international community’ he means ‘a meeting of the UN Security Council’ – the Security Council whose permanent members are the US, UK and France, who have done so much to destabilise and devastate vast swathes of the Middle East and North Africa over the past decade; Russia, whose recent military interventions in Georgia and Chechnya suggest it is hardly a devotee of world peace; and China, which might not invade other countries but is pretty adept at brutally suppressing internal dissent. On what planet could nations whose warmongering makes the current assault on Gaza look like a tea party in comparison seriously be asked to ‘rein in’ Israel? On a planet on which Israel is seen as different, as worse than all others, as more criminal and rogue-like than any other state.

The double standards were perfectly summed up last week in the response to an Israeli writer who said in the UK Independent that Israel’s attack on Gaza and its ‘genocidal rhetoric’ made her want to burn her Israeli passport. She got a virtual pat on the back from virtually every British activist and commentator who thinks of him or herself as decent. She was hailed as brave. Her article was shared online thousands of times. This was ‘common sense from one Jew’, people tweeted. No one stopped to wonder if maybe they should have burned their British passports after Yugoslavia in 1999, or Afghanistan in 2001, or Iraq in 2003, where often more civilians were killed in one day than have been killed by Israel over the past week. Why should Israel’s bombing of Gaza induce such shame in Israeli citizens (or Jews, as some prefer) that burning their passports is seen as a perfectly sensible and even laudable course of action whereas it’s perfectly okay to continue bounding about the world on a British passport despite the mayhem unleashed by our military forces over the past decade? Because Israel is different; it’s worse; it’s more criminal.

Of course, Western double standards on Israel have been around for a while now. They can be seen not only in the fact that Israeli militarism makes people get out of bed and get angry in a way that no other form of militarism does, but also in the ugly boycotting of everything Israeli, whether it’s academics or apples, in a way that the people or products of other militaristic or authoritarian regimes are never treated. But during this latest Israeli assault on Gaza, we haven’t only seen these double standards come back into play – we have also witnessed anti-Israel sentiment becoming more visceral, more emotional, more unhinged and even more prejudiced than it has ever been, to such an extent that, sadly, it is now becoming very difficult to tell where anti-Zionism ends and anti-Semitism begins.

 

HOW TO MINIMIZE CIVILIAN DEATHS

Israel May Be Raising The Moral Standards Of Warfare
By Will Saletan
Business Insider / Slate
July 12, 2014

www.businessinsider.com/israel-is-raising-the-moral-standards-of-warfare-2014-7

Israel’s air war in Gaza has now killed more than 100 people. Around the world, there’s concern and anger. These concerns are appropriate – war is horrible, and any number of deaths should trouble us. But given that this war is happening, let’s focus on the narrower question of how to minimize civilian deaths, now and in future conflicts. How bad is this war compared to others? Are Israel’s attacks indiscriminate?

First, it’s important not to get consumed by whether you love or hate Israel. There will be other wars in other places. We need to build rules that apply everywhere. Second, we don’t need to debate the conduct of Hamas. Hamas rejects the whole idea that it’s wrong to target civilians. So behaving better than Hamas isn’t a standard worth talking about. Let’s focus instead on what Israel is doing.

1. The casualty rate. Total deaths in Gaza now exceed 100. Every account except Israel’s says most are civilians. That’s a bad ratio, but it’s skewed by the low number of Hamas military deaths, which can be traced to two factors: Most Hamas officers are lying low (literally – many are underground), and Israel has mostly targeted assets such as rocket launchers, not people. The better measure of Israel’s moral performance, then, is the number of civilian deaths. The latest tallies range from 58 to 75, though the numbers will be higher by the time you read this.

How does that compare to other conflicts? Wars differ in nature (ground vs. air, for example), pace, and duration. So let’s look at air wars and compare the civilian death rates per strike. So far in Gaza, Israel has hit approximately 1,100 sites. Using the high-end casualty count, that’s an average of one civilian death for every 14 to 15 sites struck. In the 1999 Kosovo air war, Human Rights Watch found that NATO had killed approximately 500 civilians in attacks on more than 900 targets. That’s more than one death for every two targets hit. In the invasion of Iraq, HRW cited a low-end estimate of about 3,500 civilian deaths but attributed most of these to ground combat. There seems to be no separate count for the bombing campaign. In Libya, according to the U.N. Human Rights Council, NATO killed only 72 civilians in 3,327 strike sorties. That’s three times better than Israel’s performance. Because of population density, you’re less likely to hit civilians in Libya than in Gaza. But in areview of the Libya campaign, HRW also credited “the care NATO took in minimizing civilian harm.”

2. Israel’s practices. On the whole, the worst incidents in Gaza have resulted from strikes on houses. In traditional rules of war, houses are off limits. Israel’s stated rationale for hitting houses in Gaza is that “Hamas was running the operations of their units out of these homes. Some had weapons storage caches in them.” But residents have already asserted that in some cases there was no such basis. Israel hasn’t clarified whether it thinks these houses were valid targets or whether it hit them by accident.

The “terrorists work from home” rationale raises ugly problems for the rules of war. Israel’s warning procedures, however, could become a model. In the Kosovo war, HRW says NATO failed to issue warnings that might have spared civilians. In Iraq, HRW’s report doesn’t mention any warnings during the air campaign. In Libya, the U.N. report says NATO touted its “leaflets and radio broadcasts,” which told civilians how “to avoid areas likely to be struck.” But leafleting is unreliable, and radio announcements about “areas” are, by nature, vague.

Israel claims to be doing something much better. Here’s how the IDF’s spokesman describes it:

“We phone up our enemies and tell them that we are going to blow up the building, we throw non-explosive munitions, and that is a sign they are supposed to vacate the building. Only once we have seen them vacate the building – and we are talking about [hitting] command and control places and not the terrorists themselves – then we hit.”

In other accounts, Israeli briefers have said that they also send text messages and that the final warning shot, known as a “knock on the roof,” can be a mortar strike that hits just hard enough to scare everyone out. “According to the procedure,” says Ynet, an Israeli news site, “it is only after the IDF makes sure residents have evacuated the premises that the missile that could destroy the house is launched.”

In the history of warfare, this kind of systematic warning – direct, specific, double-layered – is unprecedented. It lets the enemy military officer escape in order to avoid killing his family. But how strictly is the IDF adhering to this policy?

In some cases, there’s video evidence of targets being warned or knocked. In other cases, Gazans have confirmed that they received calls or warning flares.

But the IDF’s performance seems inconsistent. In one incident, residents say that there was no phone call and that the strike, which killed six people, came only four minutes after the knock. In another case, a video shows just one minute between the knock and the strike. In two of the worst mass-death incidents, one in Khan Yunis and the other in Rafah, residents say there were no warnings.

Israel has also killed civilians at sites where no Hamas link has been established. The worst was a nine-fatality strike on a café where people were watching the World Cup. Another was a four-fatality strike on a house in al-Meghazi. Another strike killed the driver of a news agency vehicle which, according to the Palestinian news site Ma’an, was clearly marked “TV.” The IDF says it’s investigating these cases.

3. Human shields. Israel says Hamas has inflated the civilian death count by telling Gazans to ignore strike warnings and stand in harm’s way. It’s true that some Gazans have done this. There’s photographic evidence of people going on to the roof of a targeted building after a warning. And in the worst mass-fatality incident of the campaign’s first 48 hours, witnesses say that after residents had been warned and had left the house – thereby making the IDF think it was empty – neighbors and some family members went back in to “form a human shield.” By then, the IDF couldn’t stop the missile.

It’s not clear how often this has happened or what role Hamas has played. Israel cites a TV interview in which a Hamas spokesman praised the courage of human shields. It also points to a statement from Gaza’s interior ministry, which urged Gazans not to “pay attention” to Israel’s “communications on the phones of citizens.” But praise isn’t an order, and the ministry statement may have been referring to a mass robo-calling campaign in which Israel told Gazans to leave their homes in preparation for a ground assault.

If Gazans choose to defy the warnings and go on to their roofs, what right does Israel have to strike them? The IDF claims it will strike anyway, but it has already blinked. In the case that was video-recorded, “the IDF decided not to bomb the home,” says the Israeli news site Arutz Sheva. “In most cases ... Israel will simply refrain from taking action if Israeli forces are aware of the presence of civilians in the vicinity.”

Do these factors – the fatality rate, the warnings, the shields – make Israel’s conduct acceptable? I’ll leave that to you. Either way, we need to cut through the propaganda on both sides, analyze the best information on the ground, and put it in context. In some ways, Israel is raising the standards of what can be expected in warfare. Our job is to clarify those standards and hold everybody to them, including Israel.

 

“THE ONLY PLAUSIBLE ANSWER IS STOMACH-TURNING”

Hamas is playing a dangerous game with Gazan lives
Washington Post Editorial
July 16, 2014

SO FAR Hamas’s military campaign against Israel has been a dismal failure. Thanks in part to Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system, some 1,200 rockets fired at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities have caused only one Israeli death and a few other casualties. Attempted commando attacks via the sea and a tunnel were stopped short, and a drone that ventured into Israel was quickly shot down. Yet Hamas on Tuesday rejected an Egyptian cease-fire proposal that was supported by Western governments and the Arab League and had been accepted by Israel.

Why would Hamas insist on continuing the fight when it is faring so poorly? The only plausible answer is stomach-turning: The Islamic movement calculates that it can win the concessions it has yet to obtain from Israel and Egypt not by striking Israel but by perpetuating the killing of its own people in Israeli counterattacks. More than 200 people, including a number of children, have already died in Gaza; Hamas probably calculates that more deaths will prompt Western governments to pressure Israel to grant Hamas’s demands.

So far, the tactic is not working. Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Tuesday condemned Hamas for rejecting the cease-fire and “us[ing] the innocent lives of civilians . . . as shields.” But Hamas’s commanders, who have burrowed into underground bunkers, appear to be doubling down. They are urging civilians who have left their homes to return, including some 15,000 who evacuated the northern part of Gaza in response to Israeli warnings. The cease-fire proposal was answered with a new barrage of missiles aimed at central Israel.

To be sure, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has more incentive than Hamas to agree to a cease-fire, even though a majority of the Israeli public probably opposes it. Israel has little to gain from a prolonged conflict; a threatened ground invasion of Gaza would cause heavy casualties on both sides and, if it destroyed Hamas, leave Israel with the problem of finding a new government for the territory. Mr. Netanyahu is seeking the renewal of the truce that ended the last Israel-Hamas mini-war, in 2012. That would end attacks on both sides while allowing for a gradual opening of Gaza’s border for civilian trade.

Hamas’s rejection reflects its weakened position compared with two years ago. Egypt’s military government has shut down most of the cross-border tunnels that Hamas depended on for weapons as well as revenue, making it impossible for the Gaza administration to pay its workforce. The Islamists sought relief by forming a unity government with the secular, West Bank-based Fatah movement, but that did not lead to the payment of salaries or the reopening of the border with Egypt. Following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers last month, Israel arrested dozens of Hamas’s operatives in the West Bank, making their release another objective of the missile attacks.

To its credit, Israel has used sophisticated technology, including targeted text messages and dummy warning missiles, to minimize civilian casualties. But innocent people will inevitably be killed in attacks on launchers and missile factories that are purposely placed in densely populated areas. The right response of the international community is not to surrender to Hamas’s despicable tactics but to continue insisting that it unconditionally accept the cease-fire proposed by Egypt.

CONTENTS

1. “Israel’s Iron Dome is amazing, and that’s a problem” (By Peter Coy, Business Week, July 11, 2014)
2. “Missile defenses work” (Wall Street Journal, editorial, July 10, 2014)
3. “Egyptians hoping Israel will destroy Hamas” (By Khaled Abu Toameh, Gatestone, July 13, 2014)
4. “Why I’m on the brink of burning my Israeli passport” (By Mira Bar Hillel, The Independent, July 11, 2014)
5. “Sunny with light missile cover here in Tel Aviv” (By David Goldman, PJ Media, July 10, 2014)
6. “Hamas to blame for lack of Cairo mediation over Israeli airstrikes: Ex-Fatah head in Gaza” (By Musaid Al-Zayani, Asharq Al-Awsat, July 12, 2014)
7. “Hamas officials denounce ‘criminal’ Abbas as ‘Likud member’” (Jerusalem Post, July 12, 2014)

 

ARTICLES

“I WAS IN JERUSALEM AS A TOURIST ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON WHEN IRON DOME WENT INTO ACTION IN THE CITY FOR THE FIRST TIME”

Israel’s Iron Dome is amazing, and that’s a problem
By Peter Coy, economics editor
Business Week
July 11, 2014

Israel’s astonishingly effective Iron Dome air defense has prevented Hamas from killing Israelis and spreading terror in the civilian population. Ironically, though, the better Iron Dome works, the less sympathy the rest of the world has for a nation that remains under rocket attack.

Israel hardly feels like a place under assault from close range. Bars, restaurants, and the Mediterranean beaches are still busy. Businesses are open. Although traffic is lighter than normal, the roads are hardly abandoned. Incoming rockets that would ordinarily wreak havoc are being blown up in the air, causing nothing but a boom, a puff of white smoke, and falling debris. Iron Dome’s success rate hovers around 90 percent. No other system in the world is as effective in shooting down short-range and medium-range rockets.

I was in Jerusalem as a tourist on Thursday afternoon when Iron Dome went into action in the city for the first time. An alarm sounded. We pulled our rental car to the side of the road, jumped out, and lay flat on the ground in a patch of dirt and stones next to the central bus station. People were prostrating themselves all across what passes in Jerusalem for a small park. Others continued to stand. Within a minute we heard muffled booms. We looked up and saw small, wispy clouds in the blue sky—the aftermath of the detonations. Threat over. Someone standing near me called it a miracle.

The health ministry in Gaza on Friday reported that Israeli airstrikes against targets in Gaza had killed more than 100 Palestinians, with more than 500 injured. By contrast, as the Jewish Sabbath was about to begin on Friday evening, just one Israeli had died from Hamas’s rocket attacks—an elderly woman in Haifa who had a heart attack while seeking shelter. (Eight others were injured, one seriously, when a rocket hit a gas station in Ashdod on Friday morning.)

But Iron Dome’s very success makes Israel look worse in the eyes of the world. There might well be more sympathy for Israel if Hamas broke through and achieved its objective of killing large numbers of Jews. As is usually the case in this asymmetrical war, the death toll is much higher in Gaza, where innocent women and children have died alongside Hamas operatives. The difference is that while Hamas is trying to kill civilians, Israel is trying to avoid harming them while it goes after combatants. Because Hamas hides its launchers, rocket factories, and stockpiles in densely populated areas, it’s impossible for Israel to avoid killing innocents. On Friday the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said there is “serious doubt” that Israel is complying with international human rights law.

The success of Iron Dome to date also creates painfully high expectations for continued success. The burden is felt most intensely by the operators of the seven (soon to be eight) batteries of Iron Dome interceptors, who are like overworked goalkeepers in the World Cup. The Iron Dome can be configured to operate automatically, but the Israeli air force has chosen to have human beings push the firing buttons. I spoke today with Lieutenant Colonel Assaf Librati, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, who told me that the people who fire the buttons are low-ranking officers, typically from 19 to 23 years old. The officers are authorized to fire extra interceptors if they feel an extra margin of safety is required or to overrule the Iron Dome targeting software if they think it might be mistakenly perceiving a harmless airplane as an incoming rocket. “They’re making sometimes very hard choices,” Librati said.

It will get harder for Iron Dome to live up to the high expectations for it. Hamas is constantly upgrading its arsenal with faster and longer-range rockets. The nightmare scenario for Israel would be a Hamas or other foe equipped with cruise missiles that can twist and turn in flight to evade interceptors. Or, perhaps sooner, a simultaneous launch of so many rockets that Iron Dome can’t shoot them all down. In a conference call with reporters this evening, Yair Ramati, the director of the Homa Administration within Israel’s defense ministry, said that Iron Dome has improved significantly since its first use in 2011, staying “one step ahead of the enemy.” But he said that Hamas is constantly probing the system for weaknesses.

For now, though, Iron Dome is more popular in Israel than hummus and falafel. And Hamas is still hunting for a way to damage its enemy.

 

THE STUNNING SUCCESS OF ISRAEL’S IRON DOME

Missile Defenses Work
Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors have a 90% success rate.
Wall Street Journal, editorial
July 10, 2014

The Palestinian terror group Hamas continues to attack Israeli civilians with dozens of rockets launched each day from Gaza, and as we went to press on Thursday no Israeli had been killed. This wasn’t due to some Holy Land miracle but to the stunning success of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

The Hamas missiles lack accurate guidance systems, so they are essentially shots in the dark. The Israelis don’t activate the Iron Dome system unless they judge that the missiles could hit a civilian or military target. Haaretz.com quotes Israeli defense sources as saying Iron Dome had been activated to intercept about 27% of the roughly 180 missiles that had been fired between Monday night and midday Wednesday, successfully intercepting nine out of 10. U.S. sources have confirmed the Israeli figures. That’s a remarkable record since Iron Dome is essentially firing a bullet to intercept a bullet.

In addition to sparing lives, the missile defenses give Israeli leaders more time and flexibility to plan any military response to Hamas. If they could do nothing to stop the missiles, they would have to respond with far more ferocity against Hamas targets. The Iron Dome system teaches that defensive systems can be as important in warfare as destructive offensive weapons, and they are a reminder that Ronald Reagan was right from the beginning in the 1980s despite his many liberal critics.

 

EGYPTIANS HOPING ISRAEL WILL DESTROY HAMAS

Egyptians Hoping Israel Will Destroy Hamas
By Khaled Abu Toameh
Gatestone
July 13, 2014

www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4401/egypt-israel-hamas

Over the past week there are voices coming out of Egypt and some Arab countries -- voices that publicly support the Israeli military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

They see the atrocities and massacres committed by Islamists on a daily basis in Iraq and Syria and are beginning to ask themselves if these serve the interests of the Arabs and Muslims.

“Thank you Netanyahu and may God give us more [people] like you to destroy Hamas!” — Azza Sami of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

Isolated and under attack, Hamas now realizes that it has lost the sympathy of many Egyptians and Arabs.

***

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi has thus far turned down appeals from Palestinians and other Arabs to work toward achieving a new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas telephoned Sisi and urged him to intervene to achieve an “immediate ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas. Abbas later admitted that his appeal to Sisi and (other Arab leaders) had fallen on deaf ears.

Sisi’s decision not to intervene in the current crisis did not come as a surprise. In fact, Sisi and many Egyptians seem to be delighted that Hamas is being badly hurt.

Some Egyptians are even openly expressing hope that Israel will completely destroy Hamas, which they regard as the “armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization.”

Sisi’s Egypt has not forgiven Hamas for its alliance with Muslim Brotherhood and its involvement in terrorist attacks against Egyptian civilians and soldiers over the past year.

The Egyptians today understand that Hamas and other radical Islamist groups pose a serious threat to their national security. That is why the Egyptian authorities have, over the past year, been taking tough security measures not only against Hamas, but also the entire population of the Gaza Strip.

These measures include the destruction of dozens of smuggling tunnels along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt and the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

True, there are still many Egyptians and Arabs who sympathize with Hamas, mainly because it is being targeted by Israel. But over the past week, there are also different voices coming out of Egypt and some other Arab countries -- voices that publicly support the Israeli military operation against the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip.

This is perhaps because a growing number of Arabs and Muslims are fed up with the Islamist terrorists who are imposing a reign of terror and intimidation in the Arab world, particularly in Iraq and Syria. They see the atrocities and massacres committed by Islamists on a daily basis in Iraq and Syria and are beginning to ask themselves if these serve the interests of the Arabs and Muslims.

Sisi and other Arab leaders are now sitting on the fence and hoping that this time Israel will complete the job and get rid of Hamas once and for all. Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah are certainly not going to shed a tear if Hamas is crushed and removed from power in the Gaza Strip.

The reaction of some Egyptians to the Israeli military operation has shocked Hamas and other Palestinians. As one Hamas spokesman noted: “It’s disgraceful to see that some Egyptians are publicly supporting the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip while Westerners are expressing solidarity with the Palestinians and condemning Israel.”

Addressing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Egyptian actor Amr Mustafa said that they should not expect any help from the Egyptians. “You must get rid of Hamas and we will help you,” he said. He also called on Hamas to stop meddling in the internal affairs of Arab countries. “Pull your men out of Egypt, Syria and Libya,” Mustafa demanded. “In Egypt, we are today fighting poverty that was caused by wars. We have enough of our own problems. Don’t expect the Egyptians to give more than what they have already given. We’ve had enough of what you did to our country.”

In response to Egyptian Defense Minister Sedki Sobhi’s decision to dispatch 500 tons of food and medical aid to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian newspaper El-Bashayer remarked: “The standard of living for a Gazan citizen is much higher than that of an Egyptian citizen. The poor in Egypt are more in need than the poor in the Gaza Strip. Let Qatar spend as much as it wants on the Gaza Strip. We should not send anything that Egyptians are in need of.”

Famous Egyptian TV presenter and journalist Amr Adeeb has been told by many Egyptians to “shut up” after his criticism of Sisi’s “silence” toward the war in the Gaza Strip.

One Egyptian reminded Adeeb that “Hamas is responsible for the killing of Egyptian soldiers.”

Egyptian ex-general Hamdi Bakhit was quoted as expressing hope that Israel would re-occupy the Gaza Strip. “This would be better than the Hamas rule,” he said.

Egyptian TV presenter Amany al-Khayat launched a scathing attack on Hamas.

She pointed out that Hamas agreed to the reconciliation pact with Fatah only in order to get salaries for its employees in the Gaza Strip.

Al-Khayat said that Hamas was seeking to depict itself as a victim of an Israeli attack only in order to get the Egyptian authorities to reopen the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip. “They just want us to open the Rafah border crossing,” she said on her show. “Hamas is prepared to make all the residents of the Gaza Strip pay a heavy price in order to rid itself of its crisis. We must not forget that Hamas is the armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist movement.”

Her colleague, Azza Sami of the newspaper Al-Ahram, went as far as thanking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for ordering the attack on Hamas. “Thank you Netanyahu and may God give us more [people] like you to destroy Hamas,” she wrote.

What is also remarkable is Egyptian criticism of Hamas for launching rockets at the nuclear facility in Dimona in southern Israel. Ahmed Qandeel, head of the Energy Studies Program at the Al-Ahram Strategic Studies think-tank, denounced the targeting of Dimona as “idiotic.” He warned that this would have a negative impact on the entire region and endanger the lives of many Egyptians and Arabs. “Egypt must take precautionary measures,” he advised.

In response, an Egyptian wrote: “May God make the State of Israel victorious in its war against the terrorist movement Hamas during this holy month of Ramadan.”

Echoing the widespread sentiment among Egyptians, journalist Mustafa Shardi said: “No Arab country has done for the Palestinians as Egypt did. Why doesn’t Hamas go to (Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip) Erdogan? Where is Erdogan when you need him? Why is he silent? If he opens his mouth they (Israel and the US) will hit him with a shoe. The Egyptian people are asking: Where are our people who were kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip? Hamas should apologize for the 1000 tunnels that were used to smuggle the resources of Egypt. They all have their own planes and accounts in Swiss banks.”

Isolated and under attack, Hamas now realizes that it has lost the sympathy of many Egyptians and Arabs. Some Hamas leaders are now talking about the “betrayal” and “collusion” of their Arab brethren, especially Egypt.

When the Egyptian authorities reluctantly and briefly re-opened the Rafah border crossing a few days ago, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum rushed to declare: “The Egyptian authorities opened the Rafah border crossing only to receive bodies. Egypt is imposing a blockade on the Gaza Strip and has destroyed the tunnels.”

Former Palestinian Authority security commander Mohamed Dahlan predicted that the Egyptians will not do anything to save Hamas. “Egypt won’t intervene to stop the war on the Gaza Strip because Hamas was conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt,” he said. “Hamas was working with Muslim Brotherhood against the Egyptian army.”

Hamas is paying a heavy price for meddling in the internal affairs of Egypt and some other Arab countries. But the Palestinians living under Hamas in the Gaza Strip are paying a heavier price, largely due to their failure to rise up against the Islamist movement and demand the right to live better lives.

 

“I PICK UP MY ISRAELI PASSPORT AND A BOX OF MATCHES”

Why I’m on the brink of burning my Israeli passport
By Mira Bar Hillel
The Independent (London)
Friday 11 July 2014

www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-im-on-the-brink-of-burning-my-israeli-passport-9600165.html

I can no longer stand by while Israeli politicians like Ayelet Shaked condone the deaths of innocent Palestinian women and children

She is young. She is pretty. She is a university graduate and a computer engineer. She is also an Israeli Parliamentarian - and the reason why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport. Because behind that wide-eyed innocent face lurks the Angel of Death.
Ayelet Shaked represents the far-right Jewish Home party in the Knesset. This means she is well to the right of Benyamin Netanyahu, just in case you thought such a thing was not possible.

On Monday she quoted this on her Facebook page: “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.” [Tom Gross adds: Shaked apologized for her Facebook post and removed it within hours of posting it.]

A week earlier, just before 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair was snatched and burned alive, Shaked wrote: “This is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. The reality is that this is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started it.”

So even before the boy died horribly she declared him to be the enemy, and afterwards, without any apparent hint of guilt or remorse, she was calling for the deaths of innocent women and their unborn babies.

She made me think about my mother’s sister Klara and her three small children who were living in Krakow in 1939 when the Germans invaded. They decided that the Jews – all Jews – were the enemy and had to be eliminated, not least the women and the little snakes they were raising. “Why? Ask them – they started it” , as the Nazis would say if asked.

I never met Klara or her children who had perished by 1942. I did meet my uncle Romek, who survived by working in Oskar Schindler’s factory, and his wife Yetti who survived because she spoke good German and was able to pretend she was a fine German woman who had kicked out her Polish Jewish husband, as she smiled prettily at every Nazi she came across.

My father’s brother Shmuel and his young family also perished before I was born, taken in Holland, to where they had escaped from Berlin, to the same camp Anne Frank died in.

I know what it is to have been helpless victims, living and dying under racist oppressors’ boots, and I know that today’s Israelis are no longer the victims but the perpetrators of the current crisis. Yes, Hamas are dreadful hate-filled killers and woe betide Israel had they had the wherewithal to carry out their intentions. But the fact remains that it is Israel which has the tanks, bombers, artillery, nuclear warheads and missile defences of Goliath, while ordinary Gazans had nothing a week ago and even less today, as even hospitals and schools were bombed.

Shaked got what she wanted: the death toll in Gaza is nearing 100, one in four being children. Hundreds more have serious injuries in a place where hospitals have also been bombed and medical essentials are running out.

In Israel, in spite of Hamas’s best efforts, not one death has been recorded, nor any serious injuries, although a wedding party was disrupted and got on the television news.

And, as the bombs rain on Gaza, Israeli teens have taken to tweeting scantily-clad selfies alongside their political sentiments. In two now deleted tweets, one wrote “Death to all of you Arabs you transfag” , while another proclaimed “Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!” Another teen simply tweeted “Death to these f****** Arabs” , and attached a photo of themselves pouting alongside it.

Seeing these angelic faces of evil spouting such genocidal rhetoric, I pick up my Israeli passport and a box of matches. “Not in my name, people. Not in my name!”

 

SUNNY WITH LIGHT MISSILE COVER HERE IN TEL AVIV

Sunny with Light Missile Cover Here in Tel Aviv
By David P. Goldman (Spengler)
PJ Media
July 10, 2014

Sunny with light missile cover in Tel Aviv this morning. I awoke to muffled thuds in the distance, Iron Dome shooting down Syrian-made missiles launched from Gaza, according to news reports. I attended the obligatory morning mixer for hotel guests at the bomb shelter, which fortunately lasted only five minutes before the all-clear sounded. I’ll write something more comprehensive on this soon but the thumbnail version is that Hamas is making a demonstration out of weakness. Money is tight, 44,000 Gaza civil servants haven’t been paid for weeks, and the IDF did significant damage to its infrastructure on the West Bank after the kidnapping-murder of the three yeshiva boys. Netanyahu will look indecisive and confused, because he has to deal with an openly hostile U.S. administration on one side and his nationalist camp on the other. Time, though, is on Israel’s side: economically, demographically, strategically. The proportion of Jewish births continues to soar. The fruits of a decade of venture capital investing are ripening into high-valuation companies. And the Arab world is disintegrating all around Israel’s borders.

I have no idea whether the IDF will go into Gaza on the ground, or what they will do if they do so: that’s a tricky cost-benefit calculation, and no-one outside the government has relevant information. But the broader point is that Israel will win a war of attrition. Hamas has shot off hundreds of rockets (including one that landed a few kilometers from me up north in Zichron Yaakov while I had lunch there yesterday) without causing a single injury. Iron Dome has worked brilliantly. Traffic was a bit lighter than normal last night, but there wasn’t a free table at any of the hundred or so cafe terraces on Dizengoff St., Tel Aviv’s main drag.

There will be no Intifada on the West Bank: the Palestinian Arabs are older, more resigned and less inclined to destroy their livelihoods than in 2000. Syria and Iraq continue to disintegrate, Lebanon is inundated with Syrian Sunni refugees (weakening Hezbollah’s relative position), and Jordan is looking to Israel to protect it against ISIS. Egypt is busy trying to survive economically.

Medium-term, the boycott and BDS threat become irrelevant. “Startup nation” is becoming market-cap nation as hundreds of Israeli firms exit the venture capital stage and become profitable, mature enterprises. There’s never been anything like this. India and China beckon with a combined market of 2.5 billion people. To the extent that the Europeans threaten Israel with sanctions, the term “Middle East” gradually will be replaced by “Western Asia.”

[I was interrupted by another brief visit to the bomb shelter, again for five minutes.]

In the short-term, to be sure, Israel must proceed with caution. It is still vulnerable to pressure from the U.S., which provides the bulk of its military hardware, and economic pressure from Europe, which accounts for a third of its trade. Nonetheless, Israel is winning and its adversaries are losing. B’ezrat Hashem Israel will prevail.

 

HAMAS TO BLAME FOR LACK OF CAIRO MEDIATION

Hamas to blame for lack of Cairo mediation over Israeli airstrikes: Ex-Fatah head in Gaza
By Musaid Al-Zayani
Asharq Al-Awsat (Saudi Arabia)
July 12, 2014

www.aawsat.net/2014/07/article55334187

Hamas should renounce its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood to encourage Egypt to be more proactive in negotiating a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas militants, an exiled Gaza strongman and former Fatah leader told Asharq Al-Awsat.

Mohamed Dahlan, a controversial Palestinian political figure now based in Dubai, attributed Cairo’s more hands-off approach to the ongoing Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, which entered its fourth day on Friday, to tensions between the Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi government and the Hamas Movement.

Israel’s Operation Protective Edge has seen more than 2,000 targets in the Gaza Strip being hit by airstrikes, with an Israeli Defense Force spokesman estimating one strike was taking place every 4.5 minutes.

“The real reason behind Cairo delaying taking steps is related to the fact that Hamas was in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,” Dahlan said.

Egypt’s interim authorities designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in December 2013, less than six months following the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.

“For the blockade on Gaza to be lifted, Hamas has to fix this mistake,” Dahlan added.

His comments come as Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said that it was facing difficulties in mediating a halt to the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.

“Egypt has communicated with all sides to halt violence against civilians and called on them to continue with the truce agreement signed in November 2012,” Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

“Unfortunately, these efforts over the past 10 days have met with stubbornness, with only innocent civilians paying the price.”

Cairo played a key role in brokering the 2012 truce between Tel Aviv and Hamas, but has taken a more hand-off approach during the current conflict. Egypt temporarily opened its border crossing with Gaza this week to allow critical casualties of Israeli airstrikes access to Egyptian medical care but is expected to close this once again following the end of the conflict.

 

HAMAS OFFICIALS DENOUNCE ‘CRIMINAL’ ABBAS AS ‘LIKUD MEMBER’

Hamas officials denounce ‘criminal’ Abbas as ‘Likud member’
By Jerusalem Post staff
July 12, 2014

Hamas officials assailed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his criticism of the persistent rocket attacks on Israel, Israel Radio reported on Saturday.

Leaders of the Islamist movement which rules Gaza said that Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah faction, was “aiding the enemy” by making his statement. Hamas accused the PA chief of “acting as a third party” while branding him “a criminal” and “a Likud member.”

In an interview with Lebanese television network Al-Ma’ayadin, Abbas said that Hamas’ demands for a ceasefire were unnecessary, and that both sides needed to halt hostilities immediately.

“We are the losing side, and every minute there are more and more unnecessary deaths,” the Palestinian leader said. “I don’t like trading in Palestinian blood.”

Abbas also criticized Hamas on Palestinian television. “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?” Abbas told Palestine TV. “We prefer to fight with wisdom and politics.”

“It’s not important who wins or loses,” Mr. Abbas said. “What’s important is to end this bloodshed.”

Abbas said that he has been in touch with Turkish leaders in an effort to bring about a ceasefire.

Earlier this year, Abbas’ Fatah faction and Hamas agreed to back a unity government made up of technocrats, a move that angered Israel and contributed to the disintegration of peace talks.

CONTENTS

1. “Is Hamas trying to get Palestinians killed?” (By Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg, July 11, 2014)
2. “Getting the law right on the Israel-Hamas conflict” (By Laurie R. Blank, The Hill, July 11, 2014)
3. “Gaza: the ethical dilemmas of fighting terrorism” (By Alan Johnson, Daily Telegraph, July 12, 2014)

 

ARTICLES

HAMAS AIMS TO CREATE MANY MORE PALESTINIAN “MARTYRS”

Is Hamas Trying to Get Palestinians Killed?
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Bloomberg
July 11, 2014

Mahmoud Abbas, the sometimes moderate, often ineffectual leader of the Palestinian Authority, just asked his rivals in Hamas a question that other bewildered people are also asking: “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?”

The Gaza-based Hamas has recently fired more than 500 rockets at Israeli towns and cities. This has terrorized the citizenry, though caused few casualties, in large part because Israel is protected by the Iron Dome anti-rocket system.

In reaction to these indiscriminately fired missiles, Israel has bombarded targets across Gaza, killing roughly 100 people so far. Compared with violent death rates in other parts of the Middle East, the number is small. (More than 170,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war to date.) But it is large enough to suggest an answer to Abbas’s question: Hamas is trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinians as possible.

Dead Palestinians represent a crucial propaganda victory for the nihilists of Hamas. It is perverse, but true. It is also the best possible explanation for Hamas’s behavior, because Hamas has no other plausible strategic goal here.

The men who run Hamas, engineers and doctors and lawyers by training, are smart enough to understand that though they wish to bring about the annihilation of the Jewish state and to replace it with a Muslim Brotherhood state (Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood), they are in no position to do so. Hamas is a militarily weak group, mostly friendless, that is firing rockets at the civilians of a powerful neighboring state.

The Israeli military has the operational capability to level the entire Gaza Strip in a day, if it so chooses. It is constrained by international pressure, by its own morality and by the understanding that the deaths of innocent Palestinians are not in its best political interest. The men who run Hamas -- the ones hiding in bunkers deep underground, the ones who send other people’s children to their deaths as suicide bombers -- also understand that their current campaign will not bring the end of Israel’s legitimacy as a state.

I’ve been struck, over the last few days, by the world’s indifference to Gaza’s fate. Perhaps this conflict has been demoted to the status of a Middle East sideshow by the cataclysms in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps even the most accommodationist European governments know that Israel is within its right to hunt down the people trying to kill its citizens. Regardless of the cause, Israel seems under less pressure than usual to curb its campaign.

There is no doubt that Hamas could protect Palestinian lives by ceasing its current campaign to end Israeli lives. The decision is Hamas’s. As the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday, “We face the risk of an all-out escalation in Israel and Gaza, with the threat of a ground offensive still palpable -- and preventable only if Hamas stops rocket firing.”

I understand that this latest round in the never-ending Israel-Gaza war was, in many ways, a mistake. Israel was uninterested in an all-out confrontation with Hamas at the moment, and Hamas, which is trying to manage a threat to its control of Gaza from -- believe it or not -- groups even more radical and nihilistic than it is, is particularly ill-prepared to confront Israel.

The politics of the moment are fascinating and dreadful, but what really interests me currently is a counterfactual: What if, nine years ago, when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza, the Palestinians had made a different choice. What if they chose to build the nucleus of a state, rather than a series of subterranean rocket factories?

This thought is prompted by something a pair of Iraqi Kurdish leaders once told me. Iraqi Kurdistan is today on the cusp of independence. Like the Palestinians, the Kurds deserve a state. Unlike most of the Palestinian leadership, the Kurds have played a long and clever game to bring them to freedom.

This is what Barham Salih, the former prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told me years ago: “Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don’t engage in terror. We don’t condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority. … We have spent the last 10 years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society.” What, he asked, have the Palestinians built?

So too, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, once told me this: “We had the opportunity to use terrorism against Baghdad. We chose not to.”

In 2005, the Palestinians of Gaza, free from their Israeli occupiers, could have taken a lesson from the Kurds -- and from David Ben-Gurion, the principal Israeli state-builder -- and created the necessary infrastructure for eventual freedom. Gaza is centrally located between two large economies, those of Israel and Egypt. Europe is just across the Mediterranean. Gaza could have easily attracted untold billions in economic aid.

The Israelis did not impose a blockade on Gaza right away. That came later, when it became clear that Palestinian groups were considering using their newly liberated territory as a launching pad for attacks. In the days after withdrawal, the Israelis encouraged Gaza’s development. A group of American Jewish donors paid $14 million for 3,000 greenhouses* left behind by expelled Jewish settlers and donated them to the Palestinian Authority. The greenhouses were soon looted and destroyed, serving, until today, as a perfect metaphor for Gaza’s wasted opportunity.

If Gaza had, despite all the difficulties, despite all the handicaps imposed on it by Israel and Egypt, taken practical steps toward creating the nucleus of a state, I believe Israel would have soon moved to evacuate large sections of the West Bank as well. But what Hamas wants most is not a state in a part of Palestine. What it wants is the elimination of Israel. It will not achieve the latter, and it is actively thwarting the former.

***

* Tom Gross adds: For a photo essay on the burning of the greenhouses, please see here.

 

THE MEDIA MISREPORTS INTERNATIONAL LAW

Getting the law right on the Israel-Hamas conflict
By Laurie R. Blank
The Hill (Washington)
July 11, 2014

International law has quite a lot to say about the latest violence that has flared up between Israel and Hamas. So do the media. Unfortunately, they rarely match, leading to unfortunate – and sometimes egregious – misrepresentations. In an age when both real and perceived violations of international law have a substantial effect on the legitimacy of state action, getting it wrong is way more than just bad journalism.

The core purpose of the law of war – a centuries-old framework regulating conduct during wartime – is to protect civilians and minimize suffering during wartime. In any conflict, all parties – states, rebel groups, terrorist organizations – have obligations to minimize harm to civilians. For each party, these obligations take two primary forms: protecting civilians in the areas where it is attacking, and protecting its own civilians from the consequences of attacks by the enemy party. Attacking parties must 1) attack only enemy personnel and objects; 2) refrain from any indiscriminate attacks; 3) refrain from attacks in which the expected civilian casualties will be excessive in light of the military value of the target; and 4) provide warnings for civilians of attacks where feasible. In their own territory, militaries and armed groups must refrain from locating military objectives in densely populated areas and take other steps to keep civilians out of harm’s way. Specifically, the law also criminalizes the use of civilians as human shields.

It is particularly disheartening, therefore, when perversions of this law, through biased or faulty media coverage, effectively promote the very opposite result. Consider media coverage of Israeli strikes on targets in Gaza, of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rocket attacks on Israel, and of Hamas’s actions in Gaza.

First, reports have described Israel’s comprehensive system of warnings to civilians before launching strikes in Gaza as “contentious” and suggest that it is motivated solely by the desire to evade potential war crimes charges. Under the law of war, warnings are designed to protect civilians by giving them the opportunity to leave an area of hostilities and seek safety. Examples of such warnings include radio announcements, leaflets, or other generalized communications. Israel’s use of individualized, specific warnings by phone and text goes far beyond what the law requires – it is hard to imagine how they could possibly be described as “contentious,” instead of unprecedented or protective.

At the same time, the law of war does not require warnings before targeting enemy personnel – indeed, the law authorizes the use of lethal force as a first resort against enemy fighters and military objects. Imagine the absurdity of a system that required soldiers to give the enemy a chance to hide or plan an ambush by giving a warning before attacking: The United States did not warn German or Japanese soldiers before attacking them in World War II, nor should it have. Hamas militants are fighters, not civilians, and therefore are not entitled to protection from attack, just as Israeli soldiers are not protected from attack during conflict. It is the civilians of Gaza and Israel and every other conflict zone that the law seeks to protect, through a comprehensive web of protections and obligations.

Second, Hamas has announced that it is launching rockets at Haifa, at Tel Aviv, at Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. Not at military bases, army units, communication networks or any other military target, but at cities populated by hundreds of thousands, even millions of civilians. The law of war requires that parties distinguish between military and civilian targets and only attack military personnel and targets. Deliberate attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks – attacks that are incapable of distinguishing between legitimate targets and civilians – are prohibited and are war crimes.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad fire their rockets with either no regard for the distinction between military and civilian objects or with direct intention to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure. There is no question of taking precautions to protect civilians, whether through warnings or other required measures; rather, every single rocket attack violates the law’s most fundamental obligation to protect civilians. And yet the word “indiscriminate” rarely appears in descriptions of such rocket attacks.

Third, Hamas’s use of civilians and civilian buildings in Gaza as a shield is well known. Media reports tell of rockets being launched from residential buildings and schoolyards, munitions stored in houses, mosques and hospitals, Hamas leaders using civilian homes as command posts, and civilians being encouraged to go up on their roofs as human shields. These reports unfortunately rarely, if ever, mention that such conduct violates the law and, even more important, puts civilians at ever greater risk of death and injury.

Using human shields is not a romanticized effort at neighborhood defense – it is a war crime. Using hospitals as munitions depots or sites for rocket launchers endangers every civilian who needs medical treatment, because once the hospital is used for military purposes, it loses its protection from attack. Using houses for all manner of military activity amounts to using the civilian population as a shield and risks the life of every civilian in the neighborhood. This conduct demonstrates that Hamas not only views every civilian and every city in Israel as a target – which is wholly illegal – but that it also views every civilian and every neighborhood in Gaza as an expendable pawn in a propaganda war, a tragic and equally illegal approach.

Facilitating that conduct is an unfortunate and deadly consequence of media coverage that feeds misperceptions about how Israel and Hamas are fighting. Legitimizing lawful conduct would be far better, because law has an essential role to play in war; indeed, adherence to the law is a matter of life and death.

(Blank is clinical professor of law and director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at the Emory University School of Law.)

 

THE ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF FIGHTING TERRORISM

Gaza: the ethical dilemmas of fighting terrorism
By Alan Johnson
(London) Daily Telegraph (online)
July 12, 2014

-- “Our job is preventing terror. Yet we face a tragic dilemma. Whatever we decide when fighting terror, some innocent people are going to get hurt.” Amos Yadlin, former deputy commander of the Israel Air Force, now head of the Institute for National Security Studies, writing in 2004.

When Israel left Gaza in 2005 the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: “We desire a life living side-by-side, in understanding and peace. Our goal [in disengaging] is that the Palestinians will be able to live in dignity and freedom in an independent state.”

The Hamas bomb-making chief Muhammed Deif replied instantly: “I thank Allah the exalted for his support in the Jihad of our people. To the Zionists we promise that tomorrow all of Palestine will become hell for you.”

And he was true to his word: as soon as Israel withdrew. Hamas quadrupled its rocket fire into Israel. In this way the terms were set for the Israel-Hamas relationship, and the appalling suffering of civilians on both sides.

The rockets held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have become ever more potent: from the short-range and crude Qassams fired into Sderot in 2005 to the sophisticated Iranian-supplied Fajr-5, R160 and M-302 rockets of 2014, capable of reach Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Zichron Ya’akov, 100 miles from Gaza.

Israel, then, cannot avoid grappling with an excruciating dilemma: how to use force against the terrorists of Gaza, without that force endangering the civilians of Gaza. It has developed three responses. None are foolproof.

First, intelligence. Each target is selected following long-term intelligence efforts indicating a direct link to terrorist infrastructure. I have sat with IAF spotters responsible for monitoring Gaza from the skies and seen how intimate and “real-time” is the relationship between intelligence and the use of force, and how dedicated those young soldiers are to getting it right. (The opening of the documentary The Gatekeepers captured this work and the dilemmas it throws up.)

Second, warning. Israel uses a variety of methods, each constantly refined, to avoid strikes causing civilian causalities. These methods include: leaflet drops, texting, phone calls to buildings that are going to be bombed, the use of pin point precision rockets, the use of the “knock on the roof” tactic – where Israel deploys a “scare” bomb which only makes noise in order to warn civilians leave the targeted area. Missions are aborted or altered, when they may cause civilian deaths, sometimes at huge cost to Israel. Amos Yadlin, former deputy commander of the Israel Air Force, recalls:

“In August 2002 we had all the leadership of Hamas in one room and we knew we needed a 2,000-pound bomb to eliminate all of them. Think about having Osama bin Laden and all the top leadership of al-Qaeda in one house. However, use of a 2,000-pound bomb was not approved – we used a much smaller bomb – and they all got up and ran away.”

Third, self-limitation. While the international law of war elevates military necessity in such a way it can be invoked to justify almost everything, Israel has deliberately limited its invocation of military necessity, requiring in addition:

“Purpose – the action must really help to defend Israeli citizens.

Intelligence and Proof – malicious intent and capacity must be confirmed and action must really save lives. (For example, when terrorists tried to use wire cutters to break through the fence but were unable to do so, they were monitored but ignored. When they came back the next night with better equipment, and broke through, they were engaged.)

Effectiveness – when there will be a lot of collateral damage, an alternative is taken.”

The fruits of these three responses to the dilemma – intelligence-gathering, warning civilians, and self-limitation – were seen in the 2008-9 round of conflict in Gaza, which took place before Israel had developed many of the methods used today to avoid casualties. As British Colonel Richard Kemp noted about that conflict:

“A United Nations study shows that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza was by far the lowest in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare. The UN estimate that there has been an average three-to one ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in such conflicts worldwide. Three civilians for every combatant killed. That is the estimated ratio in Afghanistan: three to one. In Iraq, and in Kosovo, it was worse: the ratio is believed to be four-to-one. Anecdotal evidence suggests the ratios were very much higher in Chechnya and Serbia. In Gaza, it was less than one-to-one.”

In the 2012 Gazan conflict. 1,600 Israeli strikes against long-range missiles and terror infrastructure caused 60-70 Palestinian civilian deaths. Each was a tragedy. Absolutely. But the ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths was without precedent in modern warfare.

So why, despite those efforts, do civilian casualties still happen, if there is an absence of intent?

First, it is in the very nature of what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously called “the fog of war” – intelligence is always incomplete, sometimes mistaken, while soldiers and planners are not just subject to human limit like anyone else but have to act in a fevered and terrifying climate.

For example, the deaths of eight non-combatants in an Israel Air Force strike in Khan Yunis on the house of a terrorist leader on Tuesday was a tragic case of the fog of war. Israeli security forces told family members by phone that the house was going to be bombed. The IAF also carried out a “knock on the roof”, sending a small missile, without an explosive warhead, onto the building’s roof to warn the strike was imminent. They family left, but seem to have returned to the house just as the missile meant to destroy the home was fired. ‘There was nothing to be done, the munition was in the air and could not be diverted,” said a senior air force officer. “Although you see [the family members] running back into the house, there was no way to divert the missile.’

Second, the awesome destructive power of modern munitions means that their sustained use within urban settings in which combatants and non-combatants are co-mingled, will always – despite every effort – produce civilian casualties.

Third, Hamas engineers the co-mingling of combatants and non-combatants. It consistently and intentionally uses the people of Gaza as human shields and deliberately locates rockets in populated areas, inside housing complexes, mosques, hospitals and schools. Hamas is even using the IDF’s early warnings to encourage civilians to gather on buildings being targeted as human shields, whilst its commanders hide underground. (It may be that Hamas urged a return to the house in Khan Yunis.)

David Cameron has been talking this week about the dilemma he faces balancing security and human rights. Whatever position one takes on the proposed legislation he feels is needed, the dilemma he identifies is real. This dilemma faces democratic societies the world over, and Israel has reckoned with it for a lot longer. In a world departing from the norms of human behaviour by the day, the Israeli experience is one we can’t afford to ignore.

ARTICLES

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIALS “BIZARRE AND UNHELPFUL”

The New York Times’s Editorial on Israel Was a Sloppy Hack Job
By Yishai Schwartz
The New Republic
July 9, 2014

In the last few years, I have had a slew of conversations where I found myself defending the New York Times’ Middle East coverage to outraged members of the Jewish community. All too often, supporters of Israel are convinced that the paper of record has it in for Israel. But the Times’ Jerusalem reporters have a notoriously difficult job, one in which every word and phrase is parsed by tens of thousands of partisans just waiting to pounce. For the most part, the reporters do a very good job, providing both accuracy and perspective. And most of the vitriol they receive comes from a place of partisan hackery rather than nuanced criticism.

I take the deteriorating situation in the Middle East very seriously, and just yesterday I wrote about some disturbing trends in Israeli society. But it’s precisely because of the high quality of the Times’ Middle East news coverage that the glaring factual flaws in yesterday’s editorial, “Four Horrific Killings,” are so astounding. I spotted three:

1. The editorial chides Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his “days of near silence” after the brutal murder of Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir. Callous silence from the prime minister in the face of a brutal murder would certainly be inexcusable. But the Times itself was already reporting Netanyahu’s condemnation of the killing as an “abominable murder” and pledge to find and prosecute the murderers on the day of the killing. (The editorial now includes a correction on this point.)

2. The editorial quite reasonably criticizes “some Israelis” for giving in “to their worst prejudices” with racial incitement. But in cataloguing specific examples, the editorial lists Netanyahu’s supposedly incendiary reference to a classic Hebrew poem of lament alongside mentions of hoodlums yelling “death to the Arabs” and a blogger’s post glorifying hatred of Arabs. The poem Netanyahu referenced is worth a read, but it’s not remotely objectionable. In fact, Bialik’s “The Slaughter” is an outpouring of anger against God, and the very phrase quoted by Netanyahu explicitly rejects the possibility of human revenge. In fact, the line before the one quoted in the Times reads, “And cursed be the man who says: Avenge!” Bialik may be the most famous poet of modern Hebrew, so even if the Times editorial board had no idea what Netanyahu was saying – rest assured that most of his audience did.

3. The editorial references the grieving Hussein Abu Khdeir’s “gestures of compassion and understanding” as a source of hope. This strikes me as a bit odd the day after Mr. Abu Khdeir took to Israeli television to say a number of deplorable things, including suggesting to the grandfather of one of the three recently murdered Israeli teens that “Maybe a Jew, one of your own, murdered them.”

That’s the hard data. Now what are we to make of this not insignificant collection of errors and misrepresentations?

The most plausible explanation for the first two errors strikes me as relatively simple: The Times editorial board doesn’t like Bibi Netanyahu. The authors’ preexisting narrative was that Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace, a source of tension and callous toward Israel’s Arab citizens. And in a fit of overconfidence, the authors didn’t bother to consult carefully with their own reporters and experts to make sure they had their facts right. But you don’t have to like Netanyahu – or even find his brand of politics remotely appealing – to realize that this editorial crossed the line from opinion to hatchet job. Of course, the Times’ general feelings about Netanyahu may or may not be justified, but the Times should know better than to gloss the facts to fit the narrative.

The third misrepresentation is a bit more complicated. But my best guess is that this last error was motivated by an exaggerated zeal to create a clean narrative of parallel Israeli and Palestinian descents into violence. After all, the point of the editorial – as best as I could make out – was to call on “leaders on both sides to try and calm the volatile emotions that once again threaten both peoples” (emphasis added). And the entire editorial is structured so as to present Israeli and Palestinian struggles with extremism in carefully constructed parallel. A mourning Israeli family’s gestures of compassion – phone calls of comfort to the Abu Khdeirs, loud declarations that all murders are equivalent, and hushing of calls to vengeance – needed a Palestinian parallel. And the Times fudged things a bit to make Mr. Abu Khdeir fit the bill.

Now, pleading for calm from all sides and critiquing incendiary rhetoric in both Israeli and Palestinian societies are certainly worthy goals for a Times editorial. But things get hairy when an editorial adopts a deliberately comparative perspective. In an attempt to be even-handed, the authors start stuffing facts into parallel tracks, even when they don’t fit. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hesitated before condemning the murders of the Israeli teens – so Netanyahu must have as well. The family of murdered teen Naftali Frankel has showed remarkable grace and compassion – so the family of Abu Khdeir must have as well. Because without that parallelism, the neat narrative of two societies drowning in equivalent quicksands of mutual hatred and lawlessness breaks down.

The desire to equate and compare, to measure Palestinian pathologies against Israeli pathologies, is both bizarre and unhelpful. How does it help either society to weigh their racism and violence one against the other? It is unseemly – and complacent – when Netanyahu pats Israel on the back for having fewer terrorists than the Palestinians, for its comparative superiority in condemning and prosecuting domestic terrorism. But it is both unseemly and irresponsible when the Times plays with the facts in order to play similar comparative games in advancing a narrative of precise equivalence.

Of course, despite the fudging of these particular facts, the Times’ preexisting narratives of a racist Netanyahu and parallel Israeli and Palestinian descents into violence might still be accurate (though from what I’ve read and seen, I don’t think it is). But one thing should not be open to dispute: In the midst of one of the most complicated and heated conflicts in the world, the Times editorial board cannot afford to be sloppy with the facts.

 

“ISRAEL, UNLIKE HAMAS, ISN’T TRYING TO KILL CIVILIANS”

The Gaza Rules
Israel, unlike Hamas, isn’t trying to kill civilians. It’s taking pains to spare them.
By William Saletan
Slate magazine
July 9, 2014

According to many critics, Israel is slaughtering civilians in Gaza. It’s “purposefully wiping out entire families,” says an Arab member of Israel’s parliament. It’s committing “genocide – the murder of entire families,” says Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Iran says Israel has committed “massacres against the defenseless Palestinians.”

The charges are false. By the standards of war, Israel’s efforts to spare civilians have been exemplary.

Israel didn’t choose this fight. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the terrorist organizations that dominate Gaza, claim that Israel provoked the conflict by arresting Hamas members in the West Bank. But arrests in one territory don’t justify aerial bombardment from another. Israel didn’t hit Gaza until terrorists had fired more than 150 rockets into Israel and had rejected a cease-fire.

Some of the pictures that purport to show devastation from the Israeli strikes are fakes borrowed from other wars. As of Wednesday afternoon, the death count ranged from 30 to 50 or more, depending on where you mark the onset of the conflict. Every death is tragic, and the longer the assault goes on, the higher the toll will go. Still, given that Israel has launched more than 500 airstrikes, you’d have to conclude that either Israel is failing miserably to kill people or, more plausibly, it’s largely trying not to kill them.

Israel’s defense minister admits his forces have targeted “terrorists’ houses” as well as “arms, terror infrastructures, command systems, Hamas institutions, [and] regime buildings.” The houses belong to Hamas military leaders. An Israeli official boasts that “there's not a single Hamas brigade commander that has a home to go back to.” Israel’s legal rationale for targeting these homes is that they were “terror command centers” involved in rocket fire or other “terror activity.” But while Israel has tried to kill commanders in their cars (and has succeeded), it has avoided unannounced strikes on their homes.

The last time Israel targeted buildings in Gaza, a year and a half ago, it used leaflets and phone calls to warn residents to get out beforehand. It also fired flares or low-impact mortars (known as a “knock on the roof”) to signal impending strikes. Human rights groups didn’t accept these measures as protection from legal responsibility, but they did hail them as progress. Israel claims to be applying the same measures today. Hamas and other Palestinian sources confirm that the Israeli military has issued phone warnings to families in the targeted homes.

The worst civilian death toll – seven, at the latest count – occurred in a strike on the Khan Yunis home of a terrorist commander. Hamas calls it a “massacre against women and children.” But residents say the family got both a warning call and a knock on the roof. An Israeli security official says Israeli forces didn’t fire their missile until the family had left the house. The official didn’t understand why some members of the family, and apparently their neighbors, went back inside. The residents say they were trying to “form a human shield.”

Human shields are a difficult problem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas is responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza, because it deliberately sets up rocket launchers and military infrastructure in civilian areas. That excuse is too broad. The low death rate in this week’s airstrikes – and the explanations from Israeli officials as to how the casualty rate has been minimized – show that it’s possible to degrade Hamas’ military assets without killing hundreds of people.

The Khan Yunis scenario is different. There, the human shield was voluntary. According to Ha’aretz, an Israeli officer insisted on Wednesday morning that if other civilians followed this example – responding to prestrike warnings by going onto the roofs to form human shields – Israel wouldn’t be deterred. Maybe the officer was bluffing. But what if this scenario happens again? And what if the would-be martyrs appear on the roof while Israel still has time to avert the strike, which wasn’t the case in Khan Yunis? Would their deaths be homicide? Would they be suicide?

That’s a tough call. But anyone concerned about the deliberate targeting of civilians in this conflict should first look at Hamas. The rocket fire from Gaza into Israel began well before the Israeli assault on Gaza. Initially, the rockets were Islamic Jihad’s idea. But in the last few days, Hamas has joined in with gusto, claiming credit for missiles fired at several Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.

Apologists for Hamas argue that its weapons are less precise than Israel’s, so collateral damage is inevitable. That won’t wash. Hamas now has longer-range missiles, known as M-302s or R-160s, that are more precise than its clumsy old Grad rockets. It has been firing the new missiles at cities anyway. Hamas has also flatly rejected the principle of sparing civilians. According to a Hamas spokesman, “All Israelis have now become legitimate targets.”

I’ve criticized Israel for demolishing the West Bank homes of suspected Arab terrorists. That policy is indefensible.* But in the Gaza war, it’s clear that Israel has gone to great lengths to minimize civilian deaths. The same can’t be said of Hamas.

***

(*Tom Gross adds: Whether or not you agree with it, and on balance I don’t, this policy is defensible. The families of Palestinian suicide bombers and other terrorists are paid vast amounts of money by the Palestinian Authority for carrying out their attacks. In destroying the terrorist’s home, Israel is trying to find an economic disincentive to balance this – and indeed many Palestinians have admitted it works, and made them think twice about carrying out attacks. So, according to many, this policy save lives.)

 

“BACK IN THE WEST BANK, PALESTINIANS FLIPPED ONTO HEBREW-LANGUAGE CHANNELS TO WATCH THE WORLD CUP, DESPITE ESCALATING VIOLENCE IN GAZA”

World Cup entangled with Mideast conflicts
By Barbara Surk
Associated Press
July 9, 2014

BEIRUT (AP) - With the World Cup in faraway Brazil coming at a time of unprecedented sectarian violence and soaring tension in the Middle East, some Arab football fans have been reduced to watching matches in secret or even – and this is where it gets complicated - on a TV channel owned by Israel.

Since the World Cup kicked off three weeks ago, Sunni Muslim extremists have seized territory in Iraq and Syria and declared an Islamic state. Lebanon has been hit by a spate of suicide bombings. Israelis and Palestinians were pushed to full conflict after the murders of four teenagers. Egypt’s political divide grew wider as hundreds of people charged with supporting the ousted Muslim Brotherhood group were convicted of terrorism-related crimes - including three journalists for Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera network.

Many accuse the Doha-based network of editorial bias in favor of the now banned Islamic group in Egypt and of Sunni insurgents fighting Shiite-dominated governments in Syria and Iraq.

Qatar’s media conglomerate owns broadcasting rights to the World Cup in the Middle East, charging viewers from $110 to $320 for a three-month subscription that includes the 64 World Cup matches - a tournament that should have been a welcome escape for millions of football fans.

Most fans can’t afford to pay for the satellite broadcasts of the World Cup, which was previously shown around the region on state free-to-air channels. Some Egyptians refuse to subscribe to Qatar’s channel for political reasons.

Watching a recent match in a cafe in downtown Cairo, 21-year-old student Mohammed Mostafa said his family is boycotting Al-Jazeera and instead tunes in to an Israeli channel that has been broadcasting the World Cup for free, with commentary in Hebrew – a foreign language to most Arabs.

“My parents refuse to give money to the Brotherhood,” Mostafa explained.

That kind of attitude has outraged officials in Egypt, where state media has lashed out at Israel by saying it has opportunistically barged into the Arab broadcasting market.

“Israeli media penetration into the Arab community is more devastating than its missiles,” said Mohammed Shabana, the director of Egypt’s Sports Writers Association. But he also criticized Qatar, saying the oil-rich Gulf state should have dismantled Israel’s plot to win over Egyptian fans, and offered a subsidized deal to the Cairo government that would air the World Cup to its citizens for free.

Israel “is our biggest enemy,” Shabana said. “If the only way (to avoid Israel’s channel) is to give money to Qatar, then we should do it.”

For Raaouf Sobhy, a cafe owner in Cairo’s upscale Heliopolis district, choosing which channel to watch was a simple decision.

“I hate Qatar more than Israel,” Sobhy said. “I don’t think Israel is harming us as much as Qatar.”

In south Lebanon near the frontier with Israel, some turn on the Israeli broadcast, even though Israeli TV channels have been banned since 2000 when Israel withdrew its troops following 18 years of occupation. Israel’s arch enemy, the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, dominates south Lebanon and its fighters have fought on the Syrian government side. Qatar is not popular there, though, because of its support for Sunni rebels in Syria.

In the village of Ein Ibil, a man watching the Israeli channel with Hebrew – a language he does not understand – commentary blasting away said he neither cares about the ban nor the country broadcasting it to him.

“I just want to watch the game,” he said on condition of anonymity for fear of harassment. “You don’t need subtitles to watch football.”

Israel welcomed viewers in neighboring countries, saying it was part of the Jewish state’s diplomatic outreach to the Arab World.

Ofir Gendelman, a spokesman for the Arabic Media in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, posted on his official Facebook page a dictionary of Hebrew soccer terms translated into Arabic.

“Reactions were mixed, but a lot of people appreciated the gesture,” Gendelman said. “I do find it fascinating that millions of Arab viewers are now watching the World Cup on Israeli TV while learning soccer terminology in Hebrew.”

Few would dare tune into an Israeli channel in Syria, where Israel remains the primary enemy despite a raging civil war which pits predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels against the forces of President Bashar Assad, who belongs to a sect in Shiite Islam. As residents of the capital enjoyed a temporary lull in mortar attacks during the World Cup, fans seem to ignore the fact that Qatar – a country on top of Assad’s black list for supporting the opposition – owns the tournament broadcasting rights that were obtained in Syria by two private companies.

There has been no World Cup viewing in public in Raqqa, a city in eastern Syria under control of a Sunni extremist group that considers most TV stations to be heretic, an opposition activist, who goes by the name Abu Ali, said in an interview over Skype. At home, the activist said, some have watched World Cup matches on a Turkish channel.

In the Iraqi capital Baghdad, fans have shunned cafes as a World Cup viewing option. Cafes have become favorite targets for Sunni extremists of the armed group that has declared an Islamic state in northern Iraq and in eastern Syria as it advances to Baghdad, the seat of the Shiite-dominated government.

Back in the West Bank, Palestinians flipped onto Hebrew-language channels to watch the World Cup, despite escalating violence in Gaza.

Hudaifa Srour, who lives in the West Bank village of Naalin, said most people don’t care what language the commentators are speaking.

“Our people are eager to escape the political problems, so even those who are not interested in sports, watch the World Cup,” Srour said.

***

Associated Press writers Mariam Rizk in Cairo, Yousur Alhlou in Jerusalem, Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad, Zeina Karam in Beirut and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

***

Tom Gross adds: I reported on Lebanese watching the World Cup on Israeli TV in this dispatch: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide) (July 2, 2014)

 

“GENERALLY THE WORLD DOESN’T SHOW ANY PARTICULAR INTEREST”

Israel has a new weapon against Hamas: International Indifference
Adam Chandler
The Atlantic
July 9, 2014

As it seems to be embarking on its third war with Hamas in less than six years, Israel faces a foe that has lost most of its key allies and the attention of the international community.

The outrage that accompanied last week’s discovery of the bodies of three kidnapped Israelis and a suspected revenge attack in which a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped and murdered has dissipated, even as the violence that followed has escalated. On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yet another expansion of the Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing operation in Gaza. Here was a similar declaration yesterday:

Ordinarily, this moment would be accompanied by a cascade of international opprobrium from Palestinian supporters, demands for restraint, and perhaps calls from Israel’s own allies to rein in its forces. Yet even as the death toll in Gaza grows from the Israeli campaign – Israel has reportedly struck 400 targets in Gaza since yesterday morning from the sea and the air – there has been relative quiet about the battle. Hamas continues to fires its rockets, hundreds of them, deeper into Israeli territory than ever before, but the normally raucous international chorus has barely made a peep so far.

In an interview with the Times of Israel, a senior Israeli official said as much:

The international community is totally disinterested. Yes, there were a few press releases from [UK Foreign Secretary] William Hague and a few others, but generally the world doesn’t show any particular interest in this.”

There are many reasons for this seemingly peculiar insouciance. Here are a few:

THE WAR-WRECKED REGION

Officials and diplomats are exhausted, spread thin, and focused on seemingly bigger problems, as Syria’s civil war grinds on and ISIS continues marauding across Iraq.

A GROUNDHOG DAY SYNDROME

It’s surreal to think that just nine weeks ago the deadline for Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to produce an outline for a comprehensive peace agreement passed, fruitlessly, and the American-brokered peace process collapsed. Now Israel and Hamas are battling for the third time in less than six years, in a conflict that more or less resembles the two previous ones.

THE ISOLATION OF HAMAS

In late 2012, the last time Israel and Hamas had more than just their conventional exchange of fire, the landscape looked much different. Hamas had an ally in Egypt President Mohamed Morsi, who hailed from the more sympathetic Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt even mediated the ceasefire that ended that round of hostilities between Israel and Hamas. With Morsi deposed and with military ruler pushing to keep Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood at the margins, Hamas doesn’t have a neighbor to turn to. Moreover, Egypt actually seems disinterested in getting involved at all.

Hamas has also lost Iran’s patronage, with whom it split last year over Hamas’ criticism of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his attacks on Sunni Muslims in the Syrian civil war. Iran remains as one of Assad’s few friends.

In other words, while Qatar and Turkey remain in Hamas’ corner, so long as the group continues to fire rockets into Israeli civilian centers, the Israeli counterattack, which comes with a qualitative military edge, will seem warranted. For the time being, everyone else has lost the interest, energy, or willingness to do anything.

Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, has now lost the ability to govern, control the other rocket-firing terrorist groups in Gaza, easily replenish its weapons, pay salaries, and keep the electricity on. One could argue that this escalation is, in part, about Hamas seeking to assert itself again, in the only way it can. Or perhaps, as Zvi Bar’el suggests, it could even strengthen Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Of course, this could all change in an instant given the volatility of the situation. But for now, the calm is particularly eerie, even as a war rages around it.

Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:

* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6

* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad

* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)

* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”

* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal

* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family

* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)

* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)

* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”

* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology

* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria

* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...

* Video dispatch 13: “Amazing Israeli innovations Obama will see (& Tchaikovsky Flashwaltz!)

* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)

* Video dispatch 15: A rare 1945 BBC recording: Survivors in Belsen sing Hatikvah (& “No Place on Earth”)

* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”

* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”

* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”

* Video dispatch 19: An uplifting video (& ‘Kenya calls in Israeli special forces to help end mall siege’)

* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?

* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?

* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.

* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon

* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring

* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)

* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv

* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict

* Video dispatch 28: CNN asks Hamas: “Do you really believe Jews slaughter Christians?” (& other items)

* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)

* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)

* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill

* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)

ARTICLE

MURDEROUS HOOLIGANS

Soccer Thugs Burned a Palestinian Boy Alive in Jerusalem
A close-knit gang of Beitar Jerusalem fans known as ‘La Familia’ ignites the Middle East
By Liel Leibovitz
Tablet magazine
July 7, 2014

If you’ve been tuned in to global reporting out of Israel recently, you know that a Palestinian youth was burned alive after three young Israeli yeshiva students were murdered, as the demons of nationalism and violence have plunged the bearded zealots on both sides into a grim whirl of death and bereavement that will only end when decent people on both sides join together and affirm their commitment to peaceful co-existence.

It was an inherently dramatic story, helped along by breast-beating disavowals and stern condemnations by Israelis from across the political spectrum, from Shimon Peres to Benjamin Netanyahu to the extremist settler Rabbi Eliyakim Levenon of Elon Moreh, who issued a “religious ruling” that the perpetrators should be put to death. It was easy for everyone to be horrified by the crime, in part because there is no actual constituency – on any side – for burning children alive. Left-wingers used the story to denounce the inherent violence of the settlement enterprise. Right-wingers used it to display their moral superiority over their neighbors, who give out candy when Jews are slaughtered.

But like so many of the narratives beamed out of the Middle East by pale Western journalists who know so painfully little about the region and its inhabitants, this story, too, is utterly false. If you want to understand the gruesome murder of 16-year-old Muhammed Abu-Khudair in the hands of six young Israelis last week, don’t turn to Bibi or the Bible or Hamas or Abbas: turn to Beitar Jerusalem, the favorite soccer team of Israel’s undivided capital.

All six suspects are fanatical Beitar fans. According to an Israeli police officer familiar with the investigation, who spoke to Buzzfeed on condition of anonymity, members of the murderous cabal are all affiliated with La Familia, a small group of several thousand Beitar fans known for their anti-Arab opinions and a more general penchant for thuggery. The six met at a soccer-related rally, the cop said, and decided to expand the scope of their hooliganism as far as they could, resulting in the murder of Abu-Khudair a short while later.

To American readers, across the ideological spectrum, very little about the soccer thug scenario is likely to make sense. Violence, it’s much easier to believe, is cyclical and systemic, the product of lunatic rabbis, the evil terror-plotters and bomb-makers of Hamas, and politicians on both sides who fan the flames ever-higher in order to maintain their grip on power. To think for one moment that violence might stem from soccer is about as comprehensible to most Americans as the incessant flopping and complaining in the World Cup quarterfinals.

Yet if you understand soccer, and if you know Beitar, you realize that an act of extreme Clockwork Orange-style violence is an entirely possible, even predictable, outcome of the team’s fringe culture. I speak from experience: I am a lifelong, dedicated fan of Beitar Jerusalem, and during my years attending its games I’ve witnessed my share of appalling brutalities, in times of crisis and times of peace, almost always without any racial or nationalistic impetus. As far as I could tell, the aim was simply the pure, visceral, sickening thrill of violence. Sometimes, it appropriates the language of politics, attaching itself to a party or an ideology or an ethnic group. But it’s always first and foremost about soccer, about the ritualized violence that gives young and hopeless men meaning and comfort.

I should also admit that I often found these sprinklings of violence tolerable, even constructive. In a society turned flightless by the rigid demands of civility – the same principle that insists that all kids share their toys at the playground, even though there is no moral or practical reason to allow a pushy stranger access to your personal property – a little bit of raw, primordial roaring, I thought, was necessary to restore balance. That, at least, is what I told myself as I sat at Teddy, Beitar’s stadium, named after Jerusalem’s legendary mayor Teddy Kollek, watching fans slap, kick, and knee each other, hard, in-between ribald chants. I enjoyed the dark Yin of this mild thuggery, which balanced out the Yang of sensitivity training and fad diets.

And then there were horrible moments of reckoning. One such moment came in the late 1990s, when Beitar lost a crucial do-or-die match to Maccabi Tel Aviv. Maccabi plays in Ramat Gan Stadium, which is right next door to the Ramat Gan mall, one of the nation’s first and largest institutions of its kind. By the time the referee blew the final whistle, most of the Beitar fans seated next to me had come up with an instructive chant: “Burn down the mall,” it went, “burn down the mall, burn down the mall.”

Which is what they tried to do: Someone produced a few rags, someone else had a match, and before too long a horde of a few dozen fans, paintless Bravehearts in jeans and T-shirts, advanced on Ramat Gan mall’s nearest gate with destructive glee. Policemen arrived on horseback. The fans started punching the horses. Policemen dismounted to protect their beasts. The fans tried to climb into the saddle and enlist the animals in their attack. If I remember the scene correctly, and I was too terrified to pay very close attention, one of them succeeded in his quest. If you’ve seen the poster for the new Planet of the Apes film, you have a pretty good idea of what the scene looked like.

Unfortunately, moments like this have grown more and more common in recent years. La Familia – which, according to some reports is 5,500 fans strong – had moved from low-level barbarism to rabid mass attacks. Sometimes, these attacks took on a racial spin, such as when a group of 300 fans, elated after a Beitar victory, walked in to a shopping center in 2012, shouted “Muhammad is dead,” and attempted to beat up every Arab Israeli they could spot. There were the endless verbal assaults on the team’s two unfortunate Chechen Muslim players.

Yet to see La Familia as the racist brown shirts of Israeli nationalism would be to ignore the vast majority of their crimes, which show that they are devoutly egalitarian devotees of violence for the hell of it, whether they were robbing fans of opposing teams at knife point or burning down their own clubhouse – destroying equipment and precious memorabilia – to express displeasure with the team’s management. After that incident, one Beitar coach warned that if La Familia was “burning buildings now” they might “burn people next.”

It should also be noted that Beitar’s management, along with most of its fan base, was revolted by La Familia’s terrorism and did whatever it could to curb it. The Israeli police followed suit, doing everything from issuing restraining orders barring La Familia’s leadership from Teddy to arresting anyone suspected of partaking in any act of violence of vandalism. This tough stance was welcomed by most Israeli politicians; “I am glad that that the team heads and its tens of thousands of fans have come to realize the despicable fanclub has done the team more harm than good with its racist and violent displays,” Sports and Culture Minister Limor Livnat said after the clubhouse was torched, echoing the sentiments of many Israelis.

There are those who will compare the speed at which the Israeli police were able to locate the murderers of Muhammed Abu-Khudair with the Palestinian Authority’s continuing inability to bring the murderers of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach to justice. Yet one reason why the police in Jerusalem may have apprehended their suspects so quickly is that they have devoted considerable resources over the past decade to keeping tabs on the city’s violent soccer hooligans, just like police do in Munich, and Warsaw, and Brussels, and London, and Madrid. Abu-Kudair died of the same dark force, so closely intertwined with the game I love, that killed Tony Deogan, a young Swedish supporter of IFK Göteborg who was pummeled to death by fans of the rival team AIK in August of 2002; that claimed 24-year-old Mariusz B., stabbed in the back in 2003 after Polish hooligans, armed with knives and cleavers and clubs and stones, congregated in a street near the Wroclaw soccer stadium and went at it; that ended the life of Aitor Zabaleta in 1998 because he fancied Real Sociedad and his attacker preferred Atlético Madrid; that guided fans of Al-Masry to rip into their brothers who rooted for Al-Ahly in the Stadium in Port Said, Egypt, in 2012, leaving 79 dead and more than a thousand fans injured.

The truth is that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority, settler rabbis and Hamas all have nothing to do with the terrible events that unfurled after six lowlifes forced a sweet-faced kid into their car and burned him alive. Soccer does. So please, enough with the ancient hatreds and the cycle of violence. The death of Muhammed Abu-Khudair is a terrible tragedy, but it’s not one unique to Israel. Anyone who watches soccer more frequently than a few matches every four years understands that intuitively.

There are three previous dispatches relating to the killing of the three Israeli and one Palestinian teenage boys:

* “From Gibraltar to the Khyber Pass, the U.S. shares values only with one country”

* Israeli Intel exec pioneers hi-tech with Palestinians. His nephew is abducted (& Mohammed was 13)

* Fatah mocks kidnapped boys as rats (while Abbas’s wife treated in Israeli hospital)

***

You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.

ARTICLES

FANS IN TEL AVIV BARS CHEER ON IRAN

Iran Gets World Cup Support From Unlikely Fans (in Israel)
By Joshua Mitnick
Wall Street Journal
June 25

TEL AVIV—Down by a goal and on the verge of elimination from World Cup, Iran’s footballers struggled to compose an attack. Thousands of miles away in unlikely corner of the Middle East, a chant of encouragement went up: Ee-ran! Ee-ran! Eran!

The soccer fans weren’t in Tehran but in Tel Aviv, where a group of some two dozen young Israelis at a downtown bar put aside the political divide between the countries to wave Iranian flags and nibble on ‘nogal’ wedding sweets while they cheered on the Iranian side in its must-win match against Bosnia.

“The situation is really terrible. If we advance it will be from the heavens” admitted Eytan Calif, a 31-year copywriter draped in an Iranian flag. “I have my team, Italy, but Iran is part of me, even with everything that is going on right now. It’s hard to be an Iranian fan, especially these days.”

Mr. Calif was referring to the Israeli government’s drumbeat of criticism in recent years against Iran’s nuclear program and the regime’s ties to Islamist militant groups like Hezbollah that have fired rockets on Israeli towns and sought to target Israeli tourists abroad.

But that hasn’t snuffed out the affinity of some 90,000 Iranian Jews who immigrated to Israel and descendants like Mr. Calif to the country and the Iranian people.

“If the players would win, they would stir love, hope and peace, instead of focusing disagreements,” explained David Motai, a partner in a Persian language internet radio station in Israel, Radio Ran, which featured tribute videos to the Iranian soccer team in recent weeks . “The happiness of World Cup would be good for them, and they wouldn’t be dealing with other things like politics.”

Motai, who spoke by phone before the game, said that most Iranian soccer fans in Israel watch games at home rather than coming together in public places. The bar meet up Wednesday for the Bosnia-Herzegovina game was conceived as a media event by peace activists who have sought to foster ties between the two countries with the Israel-Loves-Iran Facebook page.

“The idea is to show solidarity from the Israeli side,” said Ronny Edry, who set up the Facebook page two years ago, and continues to promote communication between the sides over social media. “It’s pretty easy through sports.”

In fact, several days earlier a group of partying Iranian soccer fans in Brazil for the World Cup pre-empted Mr. Edry’s move. When approached by a Israeli television reporter, one fan bellowed “Israel good! Israel good!” and then kissed the reporter while another fan insisted, “Israel and Iran are brothers.”

Some Israelis support the team because they believe the players disagree with the policies of the Iranian government. “The team has a special representative of the government to ensure they don’t defect. I know, I’m involved,” said David Dariush, a 43-year-old Tehran native who said he has special satellite that lets him see the team games.

Chatting in Persian with Mr. Dariush was a boyhood friend from Tehran, Meir Javedanfar, now of Tel Aviv, offered some match analysis: “I think there’s a better chance for a nuclear agreement than of Iran advancing in this tournament,” he said.

Finally, an Iranian goal with eight minutes remaining in regular time triggered celebration in Tel Aviv, but it was quickly ended by a Bosnian retaliatory strike, sealing Iran’s exit from tournament play.

“We would have love for Iran to win the match, said Dan Kashani, who traces back nine generations of family from Iran and organized the meet up with Mr. Edri, “but the main point is to show people in Iran that there are people in the middle of Tel Aviv cheering for them.’’

 

FASTING FOOTBALLERS

Ramadan poses challenge for Muslim players at World Cup
France 24 with AFP
June 26, 2014

m.france24.com/en/20140627-world-cup-2014-football-ramadan-muslim-players/

The World Cup is set to become a whole lot more complicated this weekend for many of the Muslim players still in competition, with Ramadan – a month-long period of fasting – beginning Saturday night.

Dozens of Muslim players on teams such as France, Germany and Algeria will be faced with the difficult decision of whether or not to observe the holy month as the tournament enters the knockout stage.

Ramadan, one of the five pillars of Islam, is meant to be a time of increased spiritual reflection and prayer. Muslims are obligated to give up all food and liquids from dawn until dusk, rising early to eat before the start of the day, and then breaking the fast after sunset. This often means changing the body’s schedule.

Yet for Muslim players competing at the World Cup, the physical demands imposed by the holiday could put them at a disadvantage. Not only do they need food for fuel, but the humidity and heat in Brazil make it all the more important to stay hydrated.

Some players may opt to forgo fasting under a tenet that exempts travelers – as well as those who are sick or pregnant – from observing Ramadan. Mesut Özil, who plays midfield for Germany, has already decided that he will not be observing.

“I am working and I am going to continue doing so. So I’m not going to do Ramadan,” he explained. “It’s impossible for me to do it this year.”

DIVERGING VIEWS

Not everyone, however, shares Özil’s point of view. The majority of Algeria’s players have already planned to fast, despite the dangers it could pose to their health.

The issue can be a tricky one for coaches to navigate, according Claude Leroy, who once managed both Senegal and Ghana at the international level.

“It seems very complicated to strictly respect Ramadan during the World Cup,” said Leroy, who currently coaches Oman’s national team, which did not qualify for this year’s tournament. “What do you do during matches that take place at 1 p.m. or 5 p.m., especially for hydration? It’s impossible and even dangerous”.

France coach Didier Deschamps, however, said he has left it up to his players to make up their own mind.

“It’s a very sensitive and delicate subject. There’s nothing for me to dictate," he said. "We respect everyone’s religion. Today is not the first time we’re discovering this situation. I am not in the least bit worried and everyone will adapt to the situation”.

PRECAUTIONS

As Deschamps pointed out, it is far from the first time in recent years that Ramadan has fallen during a major international competition, and, as a precaution, many Muslim athletes have sought medical advice to make sure they are in the best shape possible.

Hakim Chalabi, a former doctor for French club Paris Saint-Germain, has worked with many fasting football players in the past, and has become FIFA’s expert on the matter.

“It’s a time when the risk of injury increases, particularly at the lumbar, joint and muscle level,” he said. These injuries are mostly due to dehydration, rather than lack of food.

“The level of nutrition needs to change. The quality of food must also be modified in order to adapt to the exercise. Players must better hydrated. What’s more, we advise them to take longer naps during the afternoon to recover some of what they’ve lost in sleep,” Chalabi added.

Madjid Bougherra, a veteran player and captain of Algeria’s national team, has followed these guidelines to a T for the past many years. Despite that, he said everything depends on his physical well-being.

“The hardest is staying hydrated. But it’s okay, the weather is good. Some players postpone [Ramadan]. Personally, I’m going to see what my physical state is, but I think I can do it,” Bougherra said.