“[This report] concludes that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
-- Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa In his report on the UN Fact-Finding Mission in the Gaza Conflict
On the tenth anniversary of this so-called conflict, a column published in the UK newspaper The Guardian on January 7, 2019 recalled the facts of the Israeli operation Cast Lead. Oxford professor Avi Shlaim wrote, “Ten years after the first war on Gaza, Israel still plans endless brute force.” He called up statistics from the twenty-two-day attack: “13 dead Israelis, 1,417 dead Palestinians, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 wounded. According to one estimate 83% of the casualties were civilians.” Shlaim continued:
Operation Cast Lead was just the first in a series of Israeli mini-wars on Gaza. It was followed by Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 and Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. The fancy names given to these operations were fraudulent, dressing up offensive attacks on defenseless civilians and civilian infrastructure in the sanctimonious [morally superior or justified] language of self-defense. They are typical examples of Orwellian double-speak. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called the Israeli attack on 1 August 2014 on Rafah, in which a large number of civilians sheltering in UN schools were killed, “a moral outrage and a criminal act”. This description applies equally to Israel’s entire policy of waging war on the inmates of the Gaza prison. Israeli generals talk about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as “mowing the lawn”. This operative metaphor implies a task that has to be performed regularly and mechanically and without end. It also alludes to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and infliction of damage on civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair.
The professor who wrote the newspaper article is Jewish. Richard Goldstone, a distinguished judge from South Africa and the author of the UN report, is also a Zionist Jew. This is by way of saying the Israelis may have expected a sympathetic report. Instead, Goldstone fulfilled his mandate and filed an unbiased report, to which Israel reacted in its predictable manner. In a Ynet news-dot-com (online version of daily Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth) article from September 16, 2009, the Israeli prime minister expressed his outrage:
The Goldstone Report is a field court-martial, and its findings were prewritten,” Netanyahu said in a closed forum. “This is a prize for terror. The report makes it difficult for democracies to fight terror.” Netanyahu joined other Israeli officials who criticized the report, including President Shimon Peres, who said earlier Wednesday that the report “makes a mockery of history” and “does not distinguish between the aggressor and the defender.
One could easily argue these are remarkable claims considering the statistics, the geographic strategic positions of the two sides, and the unfathomable difference in firepower.
Just as troubling as Israeli outrage was the situation leading up to Operation Cast Lead, which Shlaim described:
In June 2008, Egypt had brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that rules Gaza. The agreement called on both sides to cease hostilities and required Israel to gradually ease the illegal blockade it had imposed on the Gaza Strip in June 2007. This ceasefire worked remarkably well—until Israel violated it by a raid on 4 November in which six Hamas fighters were killed. The monthly average of rockets fired from Gaza on Israel fell from 179 in the first half of 2008 to [a total of] three between June and October. The story of the missed opportunity to avoid war was told to me by Robert Pastor, a professor of political science at the American University in Washington DC and a senior adviser on conflict resolution in the Middle East at the Carter Center NGO [non-government organization]. Here is what Pastor told me over the phone and later confirmed in an email to Dr. Mary Elizabeth King, another close associate of President Carter, on 8 December 2013, a month before Pastor’s death. Pastor met Khaled Mashal, the Hamas politburo [policy making committee] chief, in Damascus in December 2008. Mashal handed him a written proposal on how to restore the ceasefire. In effect, it was a proposal to renew the June 2008 ceasefire agreement on the original terms. Pastor then travelled to Tel Aviv and met Major General (Ret’d) Amos Gilad, head of the defense ministry’s political affairs bureau. Gilad promised that he would communicate the proposal directly to defense minister Ehud Barak, and expected to have an answer either that evening or the following day. Then next day, Pastor phoned Gilad’s office three times and got no response. Shortly afterwards, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead.
The incitement and the timing of the events were purposeful and diabolical. What better day to raid Gaza, break the ceasefire and spark unrest, than on November 4, the day of a presidential election in the US? No one in America was paying any attention, especially with the country on the cusp of electing its first ever black president. The slaughter then occurred during the lame duck period of George W. Bush’s presidency, that interim period of transition to Barack Obama’s first term. It conveniently concluded three weeks before Israeli elections.
On January 5, 2009, the New York Times published Scott Shane’s article “Israel strikes before an ally departs,” where the writer referred to Bush’s “eight-year record of stalwart support for Israel.” A not-at-all surprising record since his administration and its staff epitomized the concept of the United State of Israel:
Many Middle East experts say Israel timed its move against Hamas, which began with airstrikes on Dec. 27, 24 days before Mr. Bush leaves office, with the expectation of such backing in Washington. Israeli officials could not be certain that President-elect Barack Obama, despite past statements of sympathy for Israel’s right of self-defense, would match the Bush administration’s unconditional endorsement.
There’s another convenient and ironic catchphrase often employed: “Israel’s right to self-defense.” Wouldn’t “Palestine’s right to self-defense” to describe its actions be just as appropriate and accurate, if not more so.
As disgusting as it sounds, and as despicable as it is, Israel has routinely created conflict over the decades by running violent raids into Gaza and the West Bank and terrorizing Palestinians in their own homes. This bare-faced provocation is calculated to energize the Israeli public relations machine.
The Israeli government and its army are in the full-time business of public relations. You can’t justify occupying and stealing land from another people, another nation, if you don’t have a “terrorism” crutch to lean on. Calling Palestinians “terrorists” is as common and convenient as calling someone who disagrees with Israel’s policies as “anti-Semitic.”
Under the guidelines of a peaceful solution, if and when two states in close proximity can co-exist, the Muslim fanatics who want to eradicate Israel must be controlled, and so must the Jewish fanatics who are violently gobbling up Palestinian land. Also, that peaceful solution (see chapter 14) cannot be achieved as long as Netanyahu is the dictator of the country.
On Sunday, February 15, 2009, the Washington Post published an editorial entitled “Israel’s step backward,” four weeks after the Operation Cast Lead slaughter and just before Netanyahu was anointed prime minister once again:
As in the 1980s the right has the upper hand: Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have the best chance to become prime minister, even though his party finished second behind the centrist Kadima [party]. Americans who remember Mr. Netanyahu’s last stint as prime minister in the 1990s—and there are several in the Obama administration who were working on Mideast policy then—have to be concerned that he would repeat his strategy of seeking to delay or undermine all peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He might also press for Israeli or American military action against Iran, and he has promised to “topple” and “uproot” Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
The concerns as expressed by the Post are best described as “spot on.”
The State of Israel already exists. One of Netanyahu’s ongoing preconditions to peace talks over the years has been “no two-state solution until Hamas recognizes Israel as the Jewish state.” Netanyahu is fully aware that the likelihood of Muslim extremists recognizing Israel as the Jewish state is about as likely as extremist Jewish settlers recognizing the State of Palestine. Although Netanyahu’s rationale for not engaging in peace talks is transparent and childish in its simplicity, it is willingly accepted by politicians in the US of I.
No diplomacy, just violence.
The MSNBC online article on Saturday, December 27, 2008, prepared by the Associated Press and entitled “Israeli air strikes on Gaza kill 192” stated:
In the West Bank, Hamas’ [Palestinian] rival [President Mahmoud] Abbas, said in a statement that he “condemns this aggression” and called for restraint, according to an aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh. Abbas, who has ruled only the West Bank since the Islamic Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007, was in contact with Arab leaders, and his West Bank Cabinet convened an emergency session. Israel has targeted Gaza in the past, but the number of simultaneous attacks was unprecedented. Israel left Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation, but the withdrawal did not lead to better relations with Palestinians in the territory as Israeli officials had hoped.
Those relations faltered because Hamas performed very well in parliamentary elections in early 2006 against the hopes and expectations of the US of I. Hamas won a mini-civil war against Abbas’s Fatah (West Bank-based Palestinian Authority) faction, and the militant wing of Hamas continued to shoot rockets at Israel. After two years of intermittent violence, Israel ended a six-month-long ceasefire with its provocative incursion in November 2008.
The massacre of civilians as part of Operation Cast Lead served as the perfect transition to the start of the ongoing racist empire of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rarely minced words in discussing his hatred for Arabs and his plans for their demise. It also represented the realization of a shocking and terrifying Orthodox Jewish doctrine, accepted and promoted by religious leaders, the government, and the army, which calls for the slaughter of non-Jewish children. (See chapter 6.)
The day after the Associated Press story, the New York Times published an item that included a quote from a US of I official repeating a lie, and a readily accepted lie, that worked as propaganda for Israel. On December 28 in the column “White House puts onus on Hamas to end escalation of violence” by Robert Pear, the misinformation that had become readily accepted was repeated:
In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a statement that said, “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the cease-fire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza. The cease-fire should be restored immediately. The United States calls on all concerned to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the innocent people of Gaza.”
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Again, Israel provoked the end of the ceasefire when it hunted down six members of Hamas on November 4 and then intentionally avoided re-negotiation or reinstatement. The misinformation is accepted as fact, and is uniformly reported as such for the benefit of Israel. As for those “urgent humanitarian needs,” we learn more with “Israel rejects intensified push for cease-fire” in the Washington Post by Craig Whitlock on January 6, 2009:
More than 40 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Monday. Almost half of them children, and five civilians, were killed early Tuesday when a shell fired by an Israeli ship hit their house, according to local medical workers. Palestinian officials said the death toll in Gaza has risen to about 550 since Israel began airstrikes on Dec. 27. More than 2,500 people were reported wounded. At least eight Israelis have died overall, including three soldiers killed Monday evening when they were struck by an Israeli tank shell outside Gaza City, according to military officials. Two dozen others were injured by the errant shell.
How exact, considering the density of the civilian population, would one expect shelling from an offshore ship to be? Logically, one wouldn’t think precision was a priority.
On the same day, the Washington Post also published “Afghans Rally in Support of Palestinians—Many Link United States to Israeli Assault in Gaza” by Pamela Constable. They should link the United States to the assault, since American taxpayers were footing the bill. Hatred across the Muslim world, and elsewhere, directed toward the United States due to its unconditional support of Israel, is a concept John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, warned us about blowback on American civilians and military:
Those negative perceptions have strengthened the hand of conservative religious and political leaders here [Afghanistan] who mistrust the United States, and the fresh perception of US backing for Israel’s attack on Palestinian territory has further reinforced their arguments.
Establishing that theme, a telltale Q&A was provided by Washington Post staff writer Scott Wilson with his readers on January 27, 2006, after Hamas won the election:
Question from reader: The way George Bush snubbed the Palestinians and Abu Mazen [another name for Abbas], is it surprising that they voted for Hamas?
Wilson: Fatah and Hamas agree on one thing: The Bush administration’s steady condemnation of Hamas helped it at the polls. Fatah also complains that the US government’s lack of pressure on Israel to ease the occupation in the West Bank—i.e., removing checkpoints, turning over Palestinian cities to Palestinian security services— helped Hamas as well by making negotiations seem useless.
The next question harkens back to the United States and Britain overthrowing a democratic government in Iran in 1953, ultimately for oil, and ultimately leading to the Islamic revolution and installation of the hardcore government there in 1979. More similarities between the two branches of the US of I:
Question from reader: Isn’t it true that Israel was instrumental in the creation of Hamas in the late 1970’s? Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years to undermine [then Palestinian leader] Yassir Arafat’s Fatah party and the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]. Why is Israel now upset about a Hamas victory? The Israelis themselves created this Frankenstein. Now the monster has turned against its creator.
Wilson: This is true. Israel nurtured the Islamic movement as an alternative to the secular-nationalist [non-religion-based] PLO at the time. And, yes, be careful what you wish for …
In 2006, the United States wished for, and got, democratic elections, and then didn’t like the results. In answering another question Wilson points out, “Hypocrisy is a word you hear a lot in this part of the world when the Bush administration’s push for democracy in the region is raised.”
Bush administration actions led to a rise in radical Islam, period. The void left following the invasion of Iraq led directly to the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS):
Question from reader: Is the victory of Hamas a consequence of our invasion of Iraq? Did we take our eye off the ball and, by neglect, gave rise to Hamas?
Wilson: Our invasion of Iraq has, generally speaking, energized Islamic parties in the region, including Hamas. It’s hard to say more than that.
Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times encapsulates (summarizes and supports) the aforementioned concepts with his piece “The Gaza Boomerang” on January 8, 2009:
When Hamas was founded in 1987, Israel was mostly concerned with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and figured that a religious Palestinian organization would help undermine Fatah. Israel calculated that all those Muslim fundamentalists would spend their time praying in the mosques, so it cracked down on Fatah and allowed Hamas to rise as a counterforce. What we’re seeing in the Middle East is the Boomerang Syndrome. Arab terrorists built support for right-wing Israeli politicians, who took harsh actions against Palestinians, who responded with more terrorism, and so on. Extremists on each side sustain the other, and the excessive Israeli ground assault in Gaza is likely to create more terrorists in the long run.
The most infamous event of the operation occurred on January 6, 2009, as reported the next day by the Washington Post’s Foreign Service writers Griff Witte and Sudarsan Raghavan with “Israel hits U.N.-run school in Gaza—40 die at shelter that military says Hamas was firing from”:
The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation. “We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza,” said John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.
According to the story, the United Nations had opened twenty-three of its schools to serve as shelters for the population of 1.5 million. By the time of the incident, fifteen thousand people were sheltered at the various institutions.
Two days later the Post reported “100 survivors rescued in Gaza from ruins blocked by Israelis—relief agencies fear more are trapped—days after neighborhood was shelled” by Craig Whitlock and Reyham Abdel Kareem. Whitlock and Kareem describe Red Cross workers, one of whom gave an eye-witness statement, discovering seven women, six children and three men, all members of the same family, dead in the large room of a house in Zaytoun:
“Most had sustained trauma injuries from shelling, but many had gunshot wounds as well,” he said. “Four children, weak but alive, were found lying under blankets, nestled next to their dead mothers.”
“He” is Kahled Abuzaid, an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, who had his account corroborated by Red Cross officials. He said Israeli soldiers told a crew of ten paramedics and workers that they couldn’t take cameras, radios or cellphones to the area, despite being necessary items during rescue missions:
The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to grant permission for ambulances to go to Zaytoun, even though soldiers were stationed outside the houses and were aware people were wounded inside. In a statement issued early Thursday, the agency called the episode “unacceptable” and said the Israeli military had “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.” The Israeli military said it was investigating but declined to respond to specific allegations by the Red Cross.
It makes sense that Israel wouldn’t want anyone recording war crimes. For them, it’s standard public relations procedure. It’s easier to lie when there’s less documentation. On January 7, 2009, the New York Times published “Israel puts media clamp on Gaza” by Ethan Bronner:
Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.
That would be Israel’s Supreme Court, attempting to rule in a democratic manner, only to be ignored:
Each time, they were turned back by security guards, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border. And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians.
The next sentence says it all: “A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.” Whether it’s domestically or internationally, it seems the U.S. of I. loves to kill “brown people” and then attempt to cover it up.
“In dense Gaza, civilians suffer” published on January 1, 2009 in the New York Times by Taghreed El-Khodary, we are told “The United States military has also faced much criticism for killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite what officials say is the utmost precaution against doing so.”
Tens of thousands of civilians died in Iraq as a direct result of the US of I’s invasion and the anarchy that followed. The Iraq Body Count Project estimates just more than two hundred thousand civilians were slain between 2003 and 2020. Obviously, the American and Israeli politicians in power felt these families were expendable. Any outcry was especially limited in America with the government using fear-mongering to make (even bigger) racists of its citizens. (See chapter 11.)
As for the public relations effort following Operation Cast Lead, it continued for months.
In Haaretz on September 18, 2009, Barak Ravid wrote under the headline “Netanyahu Asks World to Reject Goldstone Findings”:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday rejected a United Nations report alleging Israeli war crimes during its three-week offensive in Gaza last winter, warning world leaders that they and their anti-terror forces could be targets for similar charges.
It would be a challenge then and now to think of any other government in the world involved in an “anti-terror” effort resembling Israel’s occupation and settlement operation:
“I am telling international leaders: You are telling us that you support our right of self-defense. Don’t tell us that after the next agreement, tell us now. Reject the findings of this commission,” Netanyahu told Channel 2 TV.
The United States of course backed him up with its “serious concerns”:
Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said Washington has had “serious concerns” about the mandate given to the Goldstone led four-member mission by the Geneva-based (United Nations Human Rights) council. The US officially took its seat in the 46-member body in early September.
Remarkably, almost two-and-a-half years after the events, Richard Goldstone apparently came to his senses. He wrote an op-ed in The Guardian, and on April 3, 2011 Conal Urquhart of the Guardian wrote a follow-up entitled “Judge Goldstone Expresses Regrets about His Report into Gaza War”:
Richard Goldstone, who led the committee that produced the Goldstone report, said in a newspaper article that “if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a very different document.” The judge’s article was welcomed by Israeli leaders. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, told ministers on Sunday: “There are very few incidents in which false accusations are taken back, and this is the case with the Goldstone report”. He said that Israel would now try to get the report retracted by the UN.
Of course, none of the religious fanatics or politicians would have made life difficult for Goldstone and his family, would they? Were the Goldstones ostracized (ridiculed, persecuted), or threatened?
“Goldstone was vilified after the publication of the report by supporters of Israel who accused him of a ‘blood libel,’ a false accusation that had been used to demonize Jews in the past.”
As per the US of I’s standard public relations playbook, the criminals are portrayed as the victims:
He cited the killing of 29 members of the Al-Simouni family as evidence that Israel had not deliberately targeted civilians. “The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for ordering the attack.”
Oh, it was an oops-y-daisy that’s (still) being investigated. That’s okay then. Read that again and again and contemplate the gall required to have Goldstone backtrack in this manner and then have the US accept it as expected:
He also noted that the Israeli army had begun 400 investigations into allegations against Israeli soldiers but regretted that, more than two years later, few had been finished and none had been held in public.
It became a twisted farce.
In an interview with the Associated Press after the Guardian article appeared, according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article published on April 6, 2011, Goldstone told the Associated Press he would not retract the report and that his op-ed only said that
information subsequent to publication of the report did meet with the view that one correction should be made with regard to intentionality on the part of Israel. Further information as a result of domestic investigations could lead to further reconsideration, but as presently advised, I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time.
In June of 2018, an obliging and obedient Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
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