Hands off OUR ghetto

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Natalie Rothschild: Gaza is not Warsaw
The comparison of Israel to the Nazis sums up the childish and dangerous ‘binary thinking’ that is rife in international affairs today.
I also wish people would refrain from talking about the Palestinians and Israelis in terms of 'Holocaust', 'Nazis' and the 'Warsaw ghetto' not because there aren't similarities but because, until such time as six million and one individuals from another ethnic group get wiped out these are terms well and truly owned by Jews and to use them is to immediately bring down the wrath of not just supporters of Israel but many other Jews as well. In short - it's counterproductive.

Having said that, most people aren't foolish enough to make any kind of direct comparisons. Rather they are pointing out that some of the things being done by Israel look very like some of the things done by the Nazis and every other brutal totalitarian regime to innocent people. Given that there is also an ethnic dimension as well it's hardly surprising that parallels are drawn. But no, there aren't gas chambers and no there isn't a 'final solution' and no.........

Here's the deal. We'll stop referring to the Holocaust in relation to Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians and Israel can stop using it as an excuse for doing the non-Nazi, non-Holocaust, non-Warsaw ghetto type things that have been done to the Palestinians for the last sixty years.

Please forgive me for not going on and on about Godwins Law in this piece, as seems to have become obligatory amongst bloggers. Enough already.


You attack 'em and we'll patch 'em

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Mary Dejevsky: Oxfam is there to help people – not to dabble in politics
A full-page advert...appeared in the Financial Times this week, demanding "No ifs, No buts. The fighting in Gaza must stop", and calling for "nothing less than a total, unconditional ceasefire by all sides", with "the full weight, and complete commitment, of the international community"...The £40,000 advert (more than double that, if it appeared in FT foreign editions as well) was paid for by that good old disaster charity, Oxfam.

Note: Oxfam was not appealing for money to buy food or medical assistance – both of which we know to be in desperately short supply in Gaza – but for something that is, essentially, in the gift of politicians.

How is it that a charity, such as Oxfam, whose purpose and image in the British public mind is so clearly defined as disaster relief, has gone down a route which is so political? You do not need to take one side or the other to contribute money that will pay for food, medicine or expertise. But what business is it of Oxfam's – really – whether and when the fighting stops?
Absolutely, my dear. Keep supplying wound-dressing, antibiotics, food and water to the victims of violence but whatever you do DO NOT call on all sides and on the rest of us to do everything we can to STOP the violence. NO! That would be 'political' (and, incidentally, not welcome, at this moment at least, by the Israelis.)

Not that Ms Dejevsky has an agenda or anything. Nooooooooo!

Mary who? Mary of: the very short answer

PS: Ms Dejevsky might want to address the fact that the UN, the Red Cross and other aid agencies are having to suspend or scale down their operations at this time because they are being fired on by the fucking Israeli Army (sorry, that should be the 'Israeli Defence Force').

Lampost, rope.

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CORRELLI BARNETT: A medal for Blair? No, he should be on trial for war crimes
Only the second week of January, and yet it is safe to say that the announcement that President George W. Bush has awarded Tony Blair the Presidential Medal for Services to Freedom must take the prize for the most nauseating single news item of 2009.

Of course, we can understand why Bush in the dying days of his disastrous presidency would want to 'honour' the national leader who took his country into two aggressive wars alongside America, when Blair might actually have prevented them by refusing to join in.

The Medal is really a consolation prize awarded to one rejected warmonger (prematurely retired as Prime Minister in 2007, largely because of Iraq) by another (a President with the lowest poll ratings in history, again because of Iraq).

There is always money for war

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Chris Floyd: Enduring Priorities in an Age of Change:

War and Profits Over People
If you want a glimpse of the fundamental moral obscenity that underlies our bold new era of hope and change, look no further than Barack Obama's promise this week to "overhaul" Social Security and Medicare. This effort to cut back on support for the sick, the old, the weak, the unfortunate and the abandoned will be a "central part" of the new administration's economic program, a linchpin of its struggle to curb federal spending, Obama declared...

...At the same time, he promises to expand – to expand – the multitrillion-dollar war machine that has literally bled the nation dry. He wants to expand a military-industrial-security complex that already devours more money and resources than every other military force on earth combined. He wants more troops, more weapons, an ever-increasing "global strike capability," an escalation of the endless, pointless "War on Terror" in Afghanistan and Pakistan (for starters). He has never said a single word about "curbing government spending" on this vast conglomerate of death and destruction. He has not said a single word about rolling back even a few of American military outposts that in their several hundreds now cover the entire globe. At every point, it seems, government spending on the war machine – including the tens of billions of dollars spent in secret each year on the various tentacles of the "national security" apparatus – will be increased under the Obama administration.

The lying silence of those who know

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John Pilger
The infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'.

The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the (Second World) war … we are appalled."

We know the answer

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Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask


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.