{"id":111232,"date":"2018-05-14T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=111232"},"modified":"2018-05-14T11:52:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-14T10:52:48","slug":"as-gaza-sinks-into-desperation-a-new-book-makes-the-case-against-israeli-brutality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/as-gaza-sinks-into-desperation-a-new-book-makes-the-case-against-israeli-brutality\/","title":{"rendered":"As Gaza Sinks into Desperation, a New Book Makes the Case against Israeli Brutality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A Palestinian woman covers her face as smoke billows around her during clashes with Israeli forces along the border with the Gaza strip on May 11, 2018, as Palestinians demonstrate for the right to return to their historic homelands in what is now Israel. Photo: Said Khatib\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

13 May 2018 – <\/em>Israel celebrates a double anniversary on May 15 this year, the founding of the state and the formal establishment of the Israeli Defense Forces, the name the state gave to its combined army, navy, and air force. Armed statehood fulfilled the political Zionists\u2019 dream of gathering Jews from the ancient Diaspora under their own government in what they declared to be their \u201cpromised land.\u201d During the battle over the land between 1947 and 1949, the IDF expelled three-quarters of the indigenous population. Of the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled, 250,000 took shelter in Gaza, a tiny pocket of southwest Palestine then occupied by the Egyptian army. The destitute and traumatized refugees were three times more numerous than the 80,000 Gazans who took them in.<\/p>\n

The United Nations passed but did not enforce annual resolutions calling for the refugees\u2019 return. Israel invaded the territory in 1956, withdrew under American pressure in 1957, and invaded again in 1967. As its population grew to nearly 2 million souls packed into a pocket five miles wide and 40 miles long, Gaza has become a byword for misery. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron, no advocate of the Palestinian cause, called it \u201can open-air prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his new book, \u201cGaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom<\/em>,\u201d Norman Finkelstein presents Gaza\u2019s case like a veteran prosecutor at a homicide trial. \u201cThis book is not about Gaza,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt is about what has been done<\/em> to Gaza.\u201d He asks the reader to decide \u201cwhether this writer is partisan to Gaza or whether the facts are partisan to it.\u201d He dissects three major Israeli military actions against Gaza \u2013 Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in July 2014 \u2013 as well as the Israeli commando raid on a Turkish aid flotilla in May 2010. His blistering critique encompasses the international response to those events and the prolonged siege of Gaza by Israel and Egypt. The book makes for harrowing reading, replete with exhaustive research and detailed analysis to explain Israeli objectives in Gaza. Summarizing the IDF\u2019s use of Gaza, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in the New York Times last April called it Israel\u2019s \u201ctraining field, a giant lab \u2014 for gauging the reactions of the nearly two million people it keeps under siege there, and for testing its innovating weapons, as well as the limits of what the world will let it get away with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recent history indicates that Israel can \u201cget away with\u201d a great deal. It long ago closed Gaza\u2019s port, airport and land border. The Palestinians\u2019 traditional supporters in the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, ignore them. Russia and China express sympathy while doing nothing. Nominal aid comes from Iran in the form of mostly ineffectual weapons for Hamas, a rare instance of the Shiite theocrats arming Sunni fundamentalists. Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin spoke for most of his countrymen when he said of Gaza, \u201cIf only it would just sink into the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaza is sinking, if not into the sea, into desperation. The Israeli embargo has rendered 65 percent of Gazans under the age of 30 unemployed. Health care suffers from lack of equipment and medicine. People cannot leave to find work outside, and children live with the trauma of never knowing when their homes will be bombed. When I was there in 2002, Dr. Eyad Sarraj of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program told me that almost half the children under 16 suffered bed-wetting due to constant fear. That was before the military invasions of the last 10 years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Palestinians inspect the Israeli-bombed Zeitun district of Gaza City on Jan. 23, 2009. Israel and Hamas had observed ceasefires since Jan. 18, when Israel ended Operation Cast Lead.
Photo: Olivier Laban-Mattei\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Finkelstein lists Cast Lead\u2019s toll of sites destroyed or badly damaged: 58,000 homes; 28 schools and kindergartens; 1,500 factories and workshops; 190 greenhouses; 30 mosques; media centers (killing six journalists); and 80 percent of the agricultural crop. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli civilians killed was 400 to 1. More than 300 of the 1,400 Palestinian dead were children. The onslaught included the deployment of white phosphorus, an illegal chemical agent that burns skin at temperatures up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (816 degrees Celsius).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was Israel trying to accomplish?\u201d Finkelstein asks. For the answer, he turned to the usually conscientious American scholar Anthony Cordesman. Cordesman\u2019s report, based entirely on IDF accounts, wrote that Cast Lead\u2019s goal was to \u201crestore Israel\u2019s deterrence and show Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria that it was too dangerous to challenge Israel.\u201d That is not the same as self-defense, the usual legal justification for war.<\/p>\n

The enormity of Cast Lead emerged in the meticulous report commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council in April 2009 under the eminent and pro-Zionist South African jurist Richard Goldstone. Goldstone agreed to chair a commission of inquiry on the condition that it examined crimes by all sides, including Hamas. His report, writes Finkelstein, turned out to be \u201ca comprehensive, full-blown indictment of Israel\u2019s treatment of Palestinians during the occupation.\u201d Goldstone\u2019s forensic and eyewitness evidence, much of it from Israeli combatants, was beyond reproach; but his conclusions \u2014 that Israeli forces had violated international law and were liable to prosecution \u2014 drew immediate fire from Israelis who had expected a whitewash. Former President Shimon Peres called Goldstone \u201ca technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence.\u201d \u201cProfessor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University declared that \u2018Israel had the moral right to flatten all of Gaza,\u2019\u201d writes Finkelstein. In a wry aside, one of many in the book, he notes, \u201cSteinberg founded the university\u2019s program on conflict resolution and management.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s hasbara<\/em>, or propaganda, assault was so fierce that Goldstone recanted in the Washington Post on April Fools\u2019 Day in 2011. He had not consulted his co-commissioners, who continued to defend the integrity of their report. The eventual effect of the campaign against Goldstone, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and some of Israel\u2019s own human rights societies was to frighten critics of Israel\u2019s Gaza policies into virtual silence. Operations Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge followed. They are unlikely to be the last as long as Gazans demand an end to the siege that cripples their lives, and Hamas refuses to disarm while insisting on its right under international law to resist military occupation.<\/p>\n

No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza \u2014 which the U.N. predicts will be \u201cunlivable\u201d by 2020 \u2014 is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book. For that, at least, the people of Gaza owe a debt to Norman Finkelstein.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Charles Glass<\/a> – charlesglassbooks@\u200bgmail.com<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 May 2018 – In his new book, \u201cGaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom,\u201d Norman Finkelstein presents Gaza\u2019s case like a veteran prosecutor at a homicide trial. \u201cThis book is not about Gaza,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt is about what has been done to Gaza.\u201d He asks the reader to decide \u201cwhether this writer is partisan to Gaza or whether the facts are partisan to it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":111233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}