WEEKEND EDITION COUNTERPUNCH JULY 18 2014

It’s Money, Not Blood

Is Israel’s Operation Protective Edge Really About Natural Gas?

by TASCHA SHAHRIARI-PARSA

While many articles have debunked the myth that Israel is acting out of “self-defense,” very few have attempted to establish why Israel is continuing its assault on Palestine through Operation Protective Edge, aside from the supposition that Zionists have a fanatic penchant for drawing Palestinian blood. Behind the operation, behind the mass Israeli and U.S. propaganda attempting to justify the massacre, and behind the death of every child in Gaza is a conflict rarely discussed, an imperialist conflict and a contradiction that rests on Israel’s ambitions to appropriate and profit from Gaza’s natural gas resources.

To provide some background, the natural gas issue arose in the year 2000 when British Gas (BG) discovered what they claimed to be $4 billion worth of natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza. The Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) and British Gas (BG) both invested in the project, with BG holding 60% of the rights. Since then, more gas has been found in the region. Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, has estimated that the amount of gas in Palestine is so grand that it could make Palestine as rich as Kuwait. In due reaction, since 2000, Israel has strengthened its maritime blockade on Gaza, denying Palestine basic rights over its territorial waters, driving away Palestinian fishing boats, and contaminating the waters so heavily from its naval attacks that the fishing industry essentially collapsed. “On its coastal littoral,” reported Peter Beaumont from Gaza several years ago, “Gaza’s limitations are marked by a different fence where the bars are Israeli gunboats with their huge wakes, scurrying beyond the Palestinian fishing boats and preventing them from going outside a zone imposed by the warships.” It is discernible that this is directly due to Israel’s appetite for Palestinian gas.

In recent years, Israel’s energy crisis has deepened, as marked by a letter by two Israeli scientists. “We believe Israel should increase its [domestic] use of natural gas by 2020 and should not export gas,” the letter reads. “The Natural Gas Authority’s estimates are lacking. There’s a gap of 100 to 150 billion cubic meters between the demand projections that were presented to the committee and the most recent projections. The gas reserves are likely to last even less than 40 years!” As the need for energy has grown in Israel, so have their ruthless attempts to seek it.

After the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel began negotiating with BG since, according to the former chief of staff of the IDF Moshe Ya’alon, the previously negotiated investment meant that a portion of the revenue could fall into the hands of Hamas and ‘threaten’ Israel. In other words, Israel wanted the gas, but they did not want part of the revenue to go to Hamas. Their solution, therefore, was to get rid of Hamas. More accurately, it is safe to affirm that Israel both desires a financially and militarily weaker opposition as well as a more subservient entity that may agree to willingly hand over its natural gas to Israeli profiteers.

Operation Cast Lead began in June 2008, at the exact same time that Israel contacted BG to discuss critical negotiations around Gaza’s natural gas. As these negotiations continued, Israel was killing 1,417 Palestinians, displacing over 50,000 Gazans and destroying over 4,000 homes through air strikes and a deadly ground invasion with the declared purpose of securing areas within the Gaza strip that rockets were fired from. In reality, it had nothing to do with the rockets, or a notion of “self defense”, considering how disproportionate the casualties were—just as they are now under operation protective edge. It was merely a means as part of Israel’s overall goal of appropriating Palestinian natural gas, both through territorial control and the failed attempt to defeat Hamas.

While Israel was fighting to get rid of Hamas, they were simultaneously supporting and negotiating with Fatah. In 2011, a new round of negotiations with Fatah completely excluded Hamas from the process; in turn, Hamas declared these talks as illegitimate. Even more shocking,wikileaks cables from December 2010 confirmed that Fatah had asked Israel to attack Hamas. Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s security agencyShin Bet, made comments on Israel’s desire to strengthen Fatah. “Fatah is in a very bad shape in Gaza. We have received requests to train their forces in Egypt and Yemen. We would like to get them to get the training they need, and to be more powerful, but they do not have anyone to lead them”. Before that, in 2006 after the election of Hamas, Israel authorized the delivery of “light weapons and ammunition” to armed forces loyal to Fatah.

All in all, it is clear that Fatah, heavily criticized by the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other liberation-seeking groups in Palestine, has at least to a great extent sold itself out to Israel. It is also evident that Israel would much prefer Fatah over Hamas in negotiations on natural gas. Operation Protective Edge, very much like Operation Cast Lead, has neither anything to do with self-defense (as the right may tell us), nor is it a meaningless slaughter motivated principally by a hatred for Palestinians (as the confused left may believe). It is very clear what it is: a war driven by the hankering yet callous lust of the imperialist capital of a colonial state to expand its appropriation of Palestinian natural resources and profit at the severe expense of the Palestinian people.

While Palestine must receive the full support of people around the world in its struggle for national liberation, Israel must be unequivocally condemned for its indefensible war crimes and occupation of Palestine. It is clear that Israel’s Operation Protective Edge is a misnomer, as it should be renamed to something along the lines of Operation Capital-driven Genocide. The truth is, Israel’s brutality will continue and Palestine will never be free until the Zionist apparatuses of colonialism and occupation are dismantled once and for all.

Tascha Shahriari-Parsa is a student from Vancouver, British Columbia, who has recently found himself unable to allow an hour to pass by without seeking updates on the situation in Palestine. Angered and frustrated by the horrors of Israeli war crimes and occupation, he has been involved in Palestine-solidarity activism and does what he can to spread the truth about Palestine in his community. More generally, he is interested in the liberation of the oppressed from their oppressors across the globe and in the contradictions that necessitate such liberation.

ISRAEL A KEY SOURCE OF GLOBAL RISE IN ANTI-SEMITISM

Israel a key source of global rise in anti-Semitism

 

From Antony Loewenstein blog 15 August 2014

 

Stinging Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

Israel is today the most dangerous place in the world for Jews. Since its establishment, more Jews were hurt in wars and terror attacks that took place in Israel than anywhere else. The war in Gaza took this one step backward – it endangered world Jews as well, as no other war has before it. The Jewish home, the national refuge, not only doesn’t provide refuge, but even threatens Jews everywhere else. When you tote up the results of the war, include that too in the loss column.

A wave of animosity is washing over world public opinion. In contrast to the complacent, blind, smug Israeli public opinion, people abroad saw the pictures in Gaza and were aghast. No conscientious person could have remained unaffected. The shock was translated into hatred toward the state that did all that, and in extreme cases the hatred also awakened anti-Semitism from its lair. Yes, there is anti-Semitism in the world, even in the 21st century, and Israel has fueled it. Israel provided it with abundant excuses for hatred.

But not every anti-Israeli sentiment is anti-Semitism. The opposite is true – most of the criticism of Israel is still substantive and moral. Anti-Semitism, racist as any national hatred, popped up on the sidelines of this criticism – and Israel is indirectly responsible for its appearance.

But Israel and the Diaspora Jewish establishment automatically tag any criticism as anti-Semitic. It’s an old trick – the burden of guilt is shifted from those who perpetrated the Gaza horrors to those who are tainted with so-called anti-Semitism. It’s not us, it’s you, anti-Semitic world. No matter what Israel does, the whole world is against it.

This is nonsense, of course. Just as not every policeman who gives a Jewish driver a traffic ticket is an anti-Semite, as the Jewish organizations try to put it, and not every robbery of a rabbi is a hate crime, so not every criticism of Israel is motivated by hatred of Jews.

These organizations have become the lightning rods of the criticism of Israel and they have brought it on themselves. This is the price of their blind support of Israel, their noisy propaganda campaigns in Israel’s name, their turning of every Jewish community center into a PR agency for Israel, and their unanimous support for everything Israel does. We’re all one people, they say. In that case, if every Jew who dares to censure Israel, even when it’s involved in brutal conduct, is a self-hating Jew – then everyone bears responsibility.

Quite a few Jews abroad sent me frightened messages during the war, pleading me to stop writing my articles, cease my criticism, because the anti-Semites use them. I replied to all of them that all my articles together haven’t affected Israel’s status as much as one news report from Gaza. I also know many who still harbor sympathy for Israel precisely because of the remnants here of a free society, one that allows criticism.

In any case, the address for the Jews’ fear should be the State of Israel. Many Jews now feel afraid. Part of the fear may be exaggerated, part of it is justified. It seems to me that being a Muslim in Europe is still harder than being a Jew. But in Paris, Jews don’t dare wear a kippa, in Belgium a woman wasn’t allowed into a store because she was Jewish and a French journalist who visited Algiers last week told me that the hatred for Israel and the Jews in France has reached an all-time high.

The address for all the complaints is Israel, because Israel is the one to blame for Gaza.

Whoever is afraid for the Jews’ fate, whoever is shocked by the anti-Semitic incidents, should have thought about it before taking Israel to another runaway war. The world isn’t always against Israel. Suffice it to remember Israel’s status during the Oslo period, when the entire world cheered it, including parts of the Arab world. This world will be happy to embrace Israel again, if this country only changes its bullying, domineering behavior.

Gevalt, anti-Semitism? Maybe. But Israel is supplying the fuse.

ZIONIST FAIRFAX - DEPENDENT - ALWAYS

It has long been known that the media in Australia tug their forelocks to the Australian zionist lobbies, but never has it shown itself to be so subservient as what happened in Sydney with the Sydney Morning Herald over an article by Mike Carlton on 26 July 2014 and the outcry from the zionists during the week of around 4 to 8 August 2014.

This is a long story and in Melbourne only bits and pieces have filtered through the fog, but as much as possible will be detailed.

Here is the Mike Carlton article - without the cartoon at the centre of some explosive attacks about the cartoonist's and Carlton's supposed anti-semitism - the expression all zionists use for any criticisms of their beloved country Israel:

Israel's rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism

July 26, 2014

Mike Carlton

·                             

The images from Gaza are searing, a gallery of death and horror. A dishevelled Palestinian man cries out in agony, his blood-soaked little brother dead in his arms. On a filthy hospital bed a boy of perhaps five or six screams for his father, his head and body lacerated by shrapnel. A teenage girl lies on a torn stretcher, her limbs awry, her face and torso blackened like a burnt steak. Mourners weep over a family of 18 men, women and children laid side by side in bloodied shrouds. Four boys of a fishing family named Bakr, all less than 12 years old, are killed on a beach by rockets from Israeli aircraft.

As I write, after just over a week of this invasion, the death toll of Palestinians is climbing towards 1000. Most are civilians, many are children. Assaulting Gaza by land, air and sea, Israel has destroyed homes and reduced entire city blocks to rubble. It has attacked schools, mosques and hospitals. Tens of thousands of people have fled, although there is nowhere safe for them to go in this wretched strip of land just 40 kilometres long and about 10 kilometres wide. There are desperate shortages of food and water, of medical and surgical supplies.

In an open letter to US President Barack Obama, Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon working at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, writes of "the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. Humans! 

"Ashy grey faces – Oh no! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding. We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the emergency room, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out ... the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away... to be prepared again, to be repeated all over."

The onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion: Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. In defiance of the laws of war and the norms of civilised behaviour, it is waging its own war of terror on the entire Gaza population of about 1.7 million people. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs.

As none other than Malcolm Fraser tweeted this week: "If any other country went to war killing as many civilians, women and children, it would be named a war crime." But it is not, although the UN is asking the question of both sides.

Yes, Hamas is also trying to kill Israeli civilians, with a barrage of rockets and guerilla border attacks. It, too, is guilty of terror and grave war crimes. But Israeli citizens and their homes and towns have been effectively shielded by the nation's Iron Dome defence system, and so far only three of its civilians have died in this latest conflict. The Israeli response has been out of all proportion, a monstrous distortion of the much-vaunted right of self defence.

It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory. But this is a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hardline, right-wing Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. As one observer puts it: "All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word 'fascism', which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse."

Fascism in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus.  As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it's been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.

In fact, that paragraph within the quotation marks was written by an Israeli. Gideon Levy is a columnist and editorial board member of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Born in Tel Aviv to parents who fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he despairs of what his country has become and the catastrophe its armed forces are visiting upon Gaza. After a recent column calling on Israeli pilots to stop bombing and rocketing civilians, his life was threatened and he now has a bodyguard day and night. It has come to that. In the worst insult of all, Levy is branded "a self-hating Jew".

Israeli propaganda is subtle and skillfully put. "If Israel were to lay down its arms tomorrow, she would be destroyed; but if Hamas were to lay down their arms, there would be peace," goes the line, parroted endlessly.

But in all these long and agonising decades, Israel has never offered the Palestinians a just and equitable peace. They would have only a splintered, vassal state, their polity and economy and even their borders and freedom of travel and trade managed and determined by Israel. The occupation of Palestinian lands would remain with the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea.

As the Palestine Liberation Organisation official Hanan Ashrawi put it this week in a television interview with the Australian journalist Hamish Macdonald: "No nation can accept being imprisoned, being besieged by land, by air, by sea and deprived of the most basic requirements of a decent life: freedom of movement, clean water. For seven years they have been under a brutal and lethal Israeli siege ... You shell them and you bomb them; you destroy homes, you destroy whole neighbourhoods. You obliterate, annihilate, whole families, and then you come and say that this is self defence?" 

That is why the killing and the dying goes on. Ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the rest of the world, not caring, looks away.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

That was the start of a very ugly saga which revealed the zionist influence on not only the Fairfax media, but also the Murdoch media and left both groups with mud on their faces.

At the end of his article, apparently Carlton provided his email address for people to send comments, and apparently they did, in large and abusive numbers. In responding to many of the nastiest, Carlton used language which the SMH took exception to, and the Murdoch media got hold of some of them and between them all they made a gigantic issue of it.

Carlton told some of them - and I am on his side about this, although many are not - to fuck off.
Many comments called him anti-semitic and many other crudities, probably too numerous to list here, but you get the drift!

My take on all of it is that the zionist community in Australia think they have the right to insult and abuse anyone, Jewish or otherwise, who dares to criticise apartheid zionist Israel which has been behaving as revoltingly as any police state with which we have become acquainted in the last 150 years.

The Sydney Morning Herald decided to suspend Carlton and called him in to tell him, at which stage he promptly - and correctly - resigned. In my view he had nothing to apologise for, but of course thousands have seen it differently.

The Murdoch media, who are incapable of keeping their paws off anything they deem to be fair game, climbed in with an article and cartoon, all of which were as to be expected, disgusting. The cartoon has since been withdrawn and is no longer available on the web.

The same has happened with the Glen Le Lievre cartoon which appeared with the Carlton article, and it was, together with the cartoonist, accused of the vilest anti-semitic slurs and insults known to the semi-literate newspaper classes.

If we have reached the stage when comments about Israel are off limits, then censorship of the worst type has arrived and the intimidation of journalists and those who respond to articles and blogs will be complete.

It is up to all of us to complain about those in Australia who support Israel at all times and under all circumstances, and those of the so-called Jewish religion need to take themselves off to Israel and stop pretending to show any joy at living in Australia.

I don't think the story is finished yet. Practically all politicians in Australia are zionists, whether they are Jewish or several other religions and they are all in the pocket of the Australian Jewish zionists who have them literally eating out of their pockets with their wonderful free trips to Israel.

It is all to nauseous to contemplate, and as one of our friends says when reading some of these disgusting goings-on, have a bucket handy!
 

DEMOCRACY NOW INTERVIEW ABOUT PALESTINIANS VISITING ICC HUMAN RIGHTS

Palestinians visit ICC about Human Rights

WHY ISRAEL LIES

This is a must-read article by Chris Hedges in TRUTHDIG

Chris Hedges in Truthdig

Why Israel Lies

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Posted on Aug 3, 2014

By Chris Hedges

  Palestinians evacuate a survivor of an Israeli airstrike that hit a family building Sunday in Rafah, in southern Gaza. AP/Eyad Baba

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.

I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. 

I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. 

I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. 

I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday andat least 19 at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical clinics and mosques. 

I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.

By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters. 

The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on the other. And in the uncommon cases when news of atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas.

George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called this form of propaganda doublethink. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie does not allow for the nuances and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is a state-orchestrated response to the dilemma of cognitive dissonance. 

The Big Lie permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort—a comfort they are desperately seeking—in their own moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality.

The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government. 

The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”

This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.

But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.

The Israel Defense Forces website is replete with this black propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in mosques,” the IDF site reads. “In Hamas’ world, hospitals are command centers, ambulances are transport vehicles, and medics are human shields,” the site insists.

“... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize …  a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.”

The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. 

The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence.