Polluted water in Gaza as a result of the ongoing war by Israel against the Palestinian people. The Israeli government still denies there is a humanitarian crisis in the area.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
January 5, 2009 | 08:17 AM (EST)
Why Aren't More Americans Dancing To Israel's Tune?
As soon as the first Israeli missile struck the Gaza Strip, a veteran cheering squad suited up to support the home team. "Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life," Charles Krauthammer claimed in the Washington Post. Echoing Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz called the Israeli attack on Gaza, "Perfectly 'Proportionate.'" And in the New York Times, Israeli historian Benny Morris described his country's airstrikes as "highly efficient."
While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshipers to pieces (including six children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the elite American International School, killed five sisters while they slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to kill a single Hamas leader.
So far, Israeli forces have killed at least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against Kurdish rebels.
"It was Israel at its best," Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.
By New Year's Day, Israel's cheering squad had turned the opinion pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper room. Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the Israel's war on Gaza began, to my knowledge only one offered a skeptical view of the assault.
But that editorial, by Israeli novelist David Grossman, contained not a single word about the Palestinian casualties of IDF attacks. Even while calling for a cease fire, Grossman promised, "We can always start shooting again."
Israeli public relations agents fanned out to broadcast studios from the US to Europe, fulfilling an aggressive strategy conceived after the country's catastrophic 2006 attack on Lebanon. An analysis by Israel's foreign ministry of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media concluded that Israeli representatives received a whopping 58 minutes of airtime compared to only 19 minutes for Palestinians.
"Quite a few outlets are very favorable to Israel, namely by showing [its] suffering. I am sure it is a result of the new co-ordination," said Major Avital Leibovich, an IDF spokesperson who has become a fixture on cable news in the past weeks.
But while Israel's PR machine cranked its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast, drowning out all opposing voices with its droning sound, a surprisingly substantial portion of the American public decided to dance to its own tune.
According to a December 31 Rasmussen poll (so far the only measure of US opinion on the Gaza assault), while Americans remained overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, they were split almost evenly on the question of whether Israel should attack Gaza -- 44% in favor of the assault and 41% against it. The internals are even more remarkable.
While Republicans supported the assault on Gaza by a large margin, a predictable finding, only 31% of Democrats did. Members of the Democratic base thus stood in sharp contrast to most of their elected representatives (freshman Rep. Donna Edwards is a notable exception), who backed the latest Israeli assault in lockstep, and seem to support Israel no matter what it does.
The rift between the progressive base and the party played out on Barack Obama's http://www.Change.gov site, which was deluged in recent days with demands for a statement condemning Israel's assault on Gaza.
So what accounts for the surprising trend in American opinion on Gaza? The proliferation of progressive online media and social networking sites could be a factor, but I have another theory: The same pundits who are cheerleading Israel's assault on Gaza once sold the occupation of Iraq to America, and with a nearly identical set of arguments.
In their voices and those of the grim Israeli PR agents carted out for cable news, many Americans hear echoes of the Bush administration's most fantastical lies. When they see images of Gazans under withering bombardment, they flash back to Fallujah and the assorted horrors of Iraq. When they look at Israel, they see themselves during the darkest days of the Bush era.
Now, an increasing share of Americans know what Israel is doing to Gaza. And they reject it, even when Israel is "at its best."
Diaries Live from Palestine: Resisting to protect our own
Safa Joudeh, Live from Palestine, 5 January 2009
The evening of 3 January, we realized that if there was any truth to Israeli war minister Ehud Barak's words, it's that this invasion will be a long one. At approximately 9:15pm local time Israeli forces entered the Strip from three locations.
From the east of Gaza City and the northern towns of Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, tanks rolled into the Palestinian residential areas while Israeli F-16s created a cover from the sky. At the same time, Israeli tanks and infantry troops entered Rafah from the southeast, while tanks shelling and artillery fire rained on the Mintar area of Gaza City.
Israeli warships were simultaneously barraging Gaza City from the sea. The entire Strip was surrounded and being heavily pounded by Israeli missiles and artillery fire.
Many people were not even aware that the invasion had begun, thinking the whole time that Israel had just intensified its air raids. Gaza City has been without power for a few days now and radio batteries were running out.
Almost all the residents of Gaza City have been confined to their homes for over a week and all of the stores have been closed. People are relying on word of mouth to get the news, very few are lucky enough to have generators and leftover fuel.
This war is being waged against an unarmed civilian population at the most desperate and bleak time. Israel had been systematically and indiscriminately using its most advanced military capabilities against a defenseless population -- three-quarters of whom are women and children -- for eight days prior to the invasion.
People are weak and dealing with a great amount of loss and frustration. This is to speak nothing of the 18-month-long siege that Gaza has already barely been able to hold up under.
For the past few days we have seen over 10 mosques, holy places of worship, bombed, frequently while people were praying inside. We have seen children being pulled out from under the rubble who looked like there was not a single bone unbroken in their small bodies.
We have seen hospitals overflowing with bloody corpses and people taking their last breaths. We have seen friends on television being resuscitated at sites of Israeli air raids. We have seen entire families swept off the face of the earth in one blow, and we have seen our streets, homes, neighborhoods become unrecognizable ruins from the amount of destruction.
And yet Israel continues to blatantly and insistently affirm that the offensive is not aimed at the civilians and that it's war against the political and military wings of Hamas. Meanwhile we, the people of Gaza, are collectively experiencing a kind of terror and violence that no human being should ever endure. One almost begins to suspect that the Israeli war forces are acting on a delusion that they have created and come to believe.
Israel has come into our homes, is fighting us in our streets and is expressing its brutality against us in full force. How are we supposed to react?
All Palestinian factions have united and are out facing the enemy, using all of their military capabilities that they collectively have. Although these capabilities are incomparable to the military strength exerted by Israel, yet it has made us more certain than ever that Palestinians will fight to the very end to protect their own.
It has shown us that resistance, courage and love are an integral part of the Palestinian identity that will never change despite all the hardships we endure. It has given us a moral boost, which comes at a time when we need it most.
The Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the al-Quds Brigades of the Islamic Jihad movement, The Izzedin al-Qassam brigades of Hamas, the Salah al-Din Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Fatah have all come together as one united front and at a high, almost affirmed risk of peril, are out protecting our streets and our homes, ready to die if that means preventing the death of one more helpless child.
We are united and we have accepted our fate recurrently, but the people of Gaza -- almost 80 percent of them refugees -- will not be massacred and displaced yet again by people from the outside guided by tyranny and greed.
There are estimations out there as to the collective count of the united military resistance fighters from the Palestinian factions, the number is thought to be a few thousand. The Israeli troops within and around Gaza at this moment are approximately 33,000, with more reservists being called in within the next day.
The disparity is not only in troop numbers, however. The Israeli forces are supported by the Israeli navy and the Israeli air force. The ground forces include artillery, tanks, engineering forces and intelligence agency support. The Israeli soldiers are equipped with the most modern weaponry and intelligence devices.
Palestinian fighters, on the other hand, have to make do with their homemade projectiles and a bare minimum of basic weaponry in order to defend themselves and their people against the Israeli military might.
At the moment, and in the midst of the aggression, it is hard to make sense of the current situation or make future predictions. It's hard to come to grips with the numbers and the extent of our losses. It's hard even to remember a time when basic necessities such as food, water, warmth and daylight weren't a luxury.
At this point, bare human instinct is at work -- the need to protect your loved ones, the need to ensure shelter and the instinct of fight or flight. We have fled for too long, Gaza is our last refuge and our home after we were displaced from what is now called Israel. All this happened 60 years ago.
What more could they want? We have nowhere left to go. They have disregarded every single international law there is. Now is the time to defend ourselves, now is the time for resistance.
Safa Joudeh is a master's candidate in public policy at Stony Brook University in the US. She returned to Gaza in September 2007 where she currently works as a freelance journalist.
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Human Rights
Water, sewage system "collapsing" in Gaza, says official
Report,
The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2009
GENEVA (IRIN) - The UN has warned that power networks were down in large parts of the Gaza Strip on 4 January, with hospitals relying on generators. Without power for pumps, 70 percent of Gazans are estimated to be without tap water.
Israel has been blocking fuel supplies, and stocks are dwindling, the latest (4 January) report by the UN's humanitarian coordinator in the occupied Palestinian territories said.
The Israeli Gisha organization, a non-governmental organization, said seven of the 12 electricity lines in the enclave (the 12 lines normally supply about 70 percent of Gaza's electricity) were down, and warned that the lack of power was causing sewage to flood into populated areas and farmland. There continued to be a risk of sustained flooding.
"The water and sewage system in Gaza is collapsing, cutting people off from the water supply and causing sewage to flood the streets," said Maher al-Najjar, deputy director of Gaza's water utility, CMWU. He also said 48 of Gaza's 130 wells were not working at all due to lack of electricity and damage to pipes. "At least 45 other wells are operating only partially and will shut down within days without additional supplies of fuel and electricity," al-Najjar said.
Israel's sanctions on Gaza, which have included severe restrictions on imports, mean there has been a shortage of spare parts for some time, adding to the current problems.
Red Cross surgeons unable to enter Gaza
Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva has said medical supplies, including blood, medicines and items like body bags, are needed. It has been unable to get its expert team of surgeons into Gaza, as Israel has closed the Erez Crossing. The ICRC team had been trying to get in since last week, before Israel began a ground invasion, but were blocked.
After a week of aerial strikes on the coastal enclave, Israeli began a ground offensive on 3 January, firing artillery shells and then sending troops into Gaza.
The death toll since the offensive began on 27 December is over 515 Palestinians, about a quarter of whom were civilians, according to UN estimates, and four Israelis, three of whom were civilians. The Israelis were killed by Palestinian rocket fire.
Israel has said it began the operation to contain rocket and mortar fire from the enclave.
Since the ground offensive began, movement within the enclave has become more difficult. Citizens are afraid to go outside, with one aid worker commenting that people were afraid to queue for bread, never knowing when an air strike would take place.
A woman in northern Gaza was unable to get to a hospital and suffered a still-birth and ruptured uterus, the ICRC reported.
A paramedic was killed on 4 January when his ambulance was struck by an Israeli shell, Oxfam said. In the incident, two others were injured, with one losing his foot.
An ICRC spokeswoman in Geneva stressed the need to protect medical personnel and facilities and let them carry out their work unhindered.
Aid organizations have said hospitals are taking in a large number of dead and wounded and are unable to cope, particularly given the shortages in the enclave resulting from the Israeli closures of its crossings with the Strip. The southern Rafah crossing with Egypt is also generally closed.
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