Divining the News (DTN)

His weekly postings are an insight into an Israeli Peacemaker, his latest post (A Judicial Document) has just been uploaded:

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery

	A Judicial Document • 21/03/09 • More…

	The Rape of Washington • 14/03/09 • More…

	Remember Ophira? • 07/03/09 • More…

	10 Ways to Kill Fatah • 28/02/09 • More…

	The Great Gamble • 21/02/09 • More…

	Ms Tantalus TANTALUS IS punished by the Gods for reasons that are not entirely clear. He is hungry and thirsty, but the water in which he stands recedes when he bends down to drink from it and the fruit above… • 14/02/09 • More…

	Dirty Socks “I have some good news and some bad news,” the sergeant in the joke tells his men. “The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange… • 07/02/09 • More…

Black Flag A SPANISH JUDGE has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of… • 31/01/09 • More…

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Is the whole purpose of this expose to forestall outside judicial interference?.

Israel Promises Internal Probe After Soldiers Describe Civilian Killings, Lax Rules of Engagement in Gaza Attack

The Israeli Military Advocate General has for the first time called for criminal inquiries into the conduct of Israeli troops in Gaza. The request came in response to soldiers’ testimonies that described loose rules of engagement, troops firing on unarmed civilians, and troops intentionally vandalizing property during the three-week assault on Gaza. We speak to Gaza-based journalist Amira Hass of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. [includes rush transcript]

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Also see:

Physicians for Human rights in Israel: sound and pics

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And here is a Palestinian propaganda video showing Israeli actions against Palestinian civilians:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8tQJAhILm8

The following is a transcript of Israeli military personel talking, which makes for lucid reading (because it is a transcript) about their activities in Gaza.

But really it raises more questions than answers.

Had Israel succeeded in deposing Hamas in Gaza, the stories of atrocities would have probably been buried. We would have heard interviews of Palestinians welcoming the Israelis or the Palestinian authority.

There is continuous depravation still going on throughout Gaza through an illegal blockade. In the West Bank every week, usually many times a week, Palestinians are taken away, often at night while in their beds, targeted assassinations are legal, and carried out.

And atrocities are being carried out on a continuous basis in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is one reason Israel was caught off guard, Gaza was just ‘business as usual’ for the war planners.

The outcome as we all know is world outrage at Israeli actions – but the bulk of Israelis are immune to outsiders opinions. Will Haaretz wake up the israelis?

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Aviv: “I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn’t really like they say it is. It’s more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.

“Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn’t get hurt and they wouldn’t fire on us.

“At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified – we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?

“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault … This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: ‘Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn’t get out gets killed.’

“I went to our soldiers and said, ‘The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out … This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

“And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we’ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor – something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn’t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool.

“You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.”

“One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don’t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.”  [...]

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Later in the article a commander talks about religious influence:

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The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and … their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.    –source–

Israeli troops admit what we were telling you all along. War crimes were committed against the Palestinians.

If the Jewish state is justified as necessary for the safety of the Jewish people (even though the Nazis are dead and gone) then a Palestinian state is justified as necessary for the safety of the Palestinians ( who face a present-day genocidal threat from Israel).

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072466.html

Graphic picture and slogans and descriptions in the article.

Can Haaretz turn the Israeli psyche around?

Or is it a campaign being orchestrated throughout the israeli media? Ynetnew has nothing like it, so maybe it is only Haaretz

I remember the black civil rights movement in the USA. It felt as if you could not turn the TV, Radio or a Newspaper without hearing about the inequality the blacks had. And it worked, it defused a potentially revolutionary situation.

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Today Netanyahu got a 14 day extension to form a coalition. Wonder what happens if he cannot make a Government? Will that mean a new election? Since the feb 12 elections Israelis have had some time to digest their new found pariah status in the family of nations, surely this would create a different election result. Probably more polarisation which just means a Left force would appear.

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Haaretz also has an article rationalising Israel’s tactics and aims, but wait – look at this excerpt from it, which the authour later vilifies.

What is with these blights on the backside of humanity? A vast war machine pretending to be a tiny country, a mobilized citizenry sterilized of morality, drained of compassion, bereft of conscience, bestial in war, imperial in ambition, Goliathized in its marriage of high tech and high explosive; incorrigibly bigoted bullying simpletons, little more than racists who vote for racists, fascists who fall for fascists, an embarrassment to the West, an embarrassment to the Jews, an embarrassment, at root, to the progressive individual who asks the question.

The racist Israeli fascist in me