As far as I am aware, they are not my actual tax dollars, but as our government is one of the U.S.'s closest allies, my tax dollars do inadvertently end up supporting U.S. endeavours, whether I agree with them or not. The video and further commentary can also be found here.
George Galloway, a U.K. member of parliament who spear-headed the Viva Palestina aid convoy to Gaza, was denied access to Canada after some vigorous lobbying by special interest groups. The video above parodies the situation. The wrong George got let in. On another issue (but related):Here, Galloway responds to the outrageous actions undertaken by the British Charity Commission against Viva Palestina.
The delivery of munitions from the U.S. to Israel that Chomsky references in this post have arrived in Israel. Amnesty International has the report here. Below are some paragraphs from the report. My emphasis.
Amnesty International said that the delivery should have been stopped and that failure to do so throws into question whether President Obama will act to prevent US weapons from fuelling conflicts and contributing to attacks against civilians that may amount to war crimes, as were perpetrated in Gaza.
"Legally and morally, this US arms shipment should have been halted by the Obama administration given the extent of the evidence showing how military equipment and munitions of this kind were recently used by the Israeli forces to commit war crimes," said Brian Wood. "Arms supplies in these circumstances are contrary to provisions in US law.
"There is a great risk that the new munitions may be used by the Israeli military to commit further violations of international law, like the ones committed during the war in Gaza. We are urging all governments to impose an immediate and comprehensive suspension of arms to Israel, and to all Palestinian armed groups until there is no longer a substantial risk of serious human rights violations."
The US was by far the largest supplier of weapons to Israel between 2004 and 2008. The US government is also due to provide $30 billion in military aid to Israel.
According to one US official, President Obama has no plans to cut the billions of dollars in military aid promised to Israel under a new 10-year contract agreed in 2007 by the Bush administration. This new contract is a 25 per cent increase compared to the last contract agreed by the previous US administration.
I sometimes think there is too much money tied up in the development and supply of weapons for peace to ever prevail. This information about the U.K.'s supply of arms. __________________________________________________________________
In keeping with the above, Gush-Shalom, the Israeli peace group which Uri Avnery is part of, ran this advert in the April 3rd Ha'aretz:
The sound is very low. There is a tapescript provided in a link below. The above is part one. Part two can be found on Youtube.
The fact that Obama's first television interview since becoming President was with Al Aribiya is a strong indication of a shift in the U.S.'s foreign affairs approach to the Mid-East. Though, as the summary of the interview states:
...his continuing silence on the enormous amount of civilian casualties during the Israeli offensive and accusations by the U.N. and humanitarian organizations that Israel committed war crimes ... spoke volumes to an audience that has waited for America to take a more balanced approach to the conflict.
However, he is asked many questions about Israel and Palestine and his answers are not glib.
And, look, I think anybody who has studied the region recognizes that the situation for the ordinary Palestinian in many cases has not improved. And the bottom line in all these talks and all these conversations is, is a child in the Palestinian Territories going to be better off? Do they have a future for themselves? And is the child in Israel going to feel confident about his or her safety and security? And if we can keep our focus on making their lives better and look forward, and not simply think about all the conflicts and tragedies of the past, then I think that we have an opportunity to make real progress.
One might say he is discounting the conflicts and tragedies of the past, in the above statement, but he is also acknowledging that they exist and have existed. So, even though it might read as trying to approach the situation by stripping it of all history, the opposite might be true. He is right, within the interview, to talk about acting quickly, but words take time to transform into actions, and in the meantime, will the settlements expand, and will there be more incursions, and will the sanctions still exist? Keep in mind the following:
...The period between November 4 and December 19 ...was characterized by growing escalation by both sides, including an unprecedented tightening of the blockade by Israel and Egypt. Poverty levels climbed further into the stratosphere, malnutrition skyrocketed and essential supplies of every sort ran out. Even before the latest emergency spurred UN agencies and the Red Cross to warn of imminent collapse, former UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson had on a November 4 visit denounced international indifference to the “shocking violation of so many human rights” of Gaza’s population as “almost unbelievable.” “Their whole civilization has been destroyed,” she concluded. “I’m not exaggerating.”(Birth Pangs of a New Palestine, Mouin Rabbani, January 7, 2009).
And now?
It seems that lifting the sanctions is one thing that, in theory, could happen very quickly. It seems that the Israelis are notgoing to elect a progressive government in the upcoming elections, even if this U.S. government seems to be more liberal than those in the past. And though things need to be done quickly, everything of course, takes time, and is eight years enough to even get the ball rolling?
In addition, everyone needs to come, and to be invited to the negotiation table. That means the recalcitrant Israelis, too, as detailed in *just a few* articles below.
It makes one wonder if Kevin Rudd might be thinking that he was a little too hasty to not even murmur slight concern over the way Israel conducted itself with the war on Gaza. Was there any government in the world that agreed with Bush and Israel so completely? And was there any press in the world more insipid? Maybe this article from early in 2008 goes some way to explaining why. Or maybe he is banking on a 4 year only Obama term, while his own could, in theory, continue in perpetuity.
So this is who advises Bush on his Middle East policy.
The resolution was the call for the ceasefire.
Olmert's words
"When we saw that the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice*), for reasons we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favour of the U.N. resolution ... I looked for President Bush and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a speech," Olmert said.
"I said, 'I don't care. I have to talk to him now,'" Olmert said, describing Bush, who leaves office on January 20, as "an unparalleled friend" of Israel.
"They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him. I told him, 'You can't vote in favour of this resolution.' He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing.'"
Olmert said he then told Bush: "'I'm familiar with it. You can't vote in favour.'
"He gave an order to the secretary of state and she did not vote in favour of it -- a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organised and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged," Olmert said.
Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask Wednesday, 7 January 2009
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised? Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians? What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.
What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise. Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
