{"id":23273,"date":"2012-11-26T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T12:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=23273"},"modified":"2015-03-09T12:42:09","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T12:42:09","slug":"we-are-all-israelis-now-its-brutality-unlike-syrias-is-fought-in-the-name-of-the-wests-war-on-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/11\/we-are-all-israelis-now-its-brutality-unlike-syrias-is-fought-in-the-name-of-the-wests-war-on-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are All Israeli’s Now: Its Brutality, Unlike Syria’s, Is Fought in the Name of the West’s War on Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who set the precedent when it comes to “collateral damage”? The West did. Now the Israelis reel out the same tired excuses and platitudes to justify their violence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Enough is enough. Now we have even \u201cNational Infrastructure\u201d Minister Uzi Landau \u2013 one of my favourite dogsbodies in the Israeli government \u2013 talking about \u201ccollateral damage\u201d and the justification for bombing Hamas\u2019s broadcasting station. It could be used for transmitting military instructions, he said.<\/p>\n

But wasn\u2019t that exactly what our own beloved Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara \u2013 now, I suppose, Lord Blair of the Holy Land \u2013 said after NATO bombed the Serb television station in Belgrade, when NATO, too, was blathering on about \u201ccollateral damage\u201d?<\/p>\n

We Westerners set the precedents in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq \u2013 trains, bridges, TV stations, wedding parties, blocks of civilian apartments, you name it \u2013 and now the Israelis can trot along behind and produce, whenever necessary, the same tired list of excuses we invented for NATO.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s odd, the way they all get away with it. Lord Blair, whose 92 Business Class trips to the Holy Land have produced a peace beyond all peace<\/a>, is now talking about how it\u2019s in everybody\u2019s interest to have a truce \u2013 is his face getting a bit skeletal, or is that my imagination? \u2013 and a truce, I suppose, we shall have, well over 100 Palestinian and three Israeli dead too late. But is it all worth it? Was the murder by Israel of Hamas\u2019s military leader Ahmed al-Jabari in fact not staged to provide an excuse to bomb all those new missiles that Hamas has acquired?<\/p>\n

That wise old Israeli owl Uri Avneri \u2013 he is 89 years old \u2013 thinks this is just the trap that Hamas fell into by launching its preposterous \u201cGates of Hell\u201d rocket attacks in revenge for Jabari\u2019s death. The whole Operation \u201cPillar of Defence\u201d was about destroying Hamas\u2019s weapons \u2013 not about the largely ineffective missiles themselves.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t this why Israel gave its operation the name it did? For, despite our constant repetition of \u201cOperation Pillar of Defence\u201d, Israeli friends tell me that the correct Hebrew translation of this sick war is Operation Pillar of Cloud. Which makes a lot more sense. For this comes from the Book of Exodus (13:21) \u2013 \u201cAnd the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wonder, indeed, if the ridiculous William Hague realised he was doing God\u2019s work when he gave his support to this bloodletting?<\/a><\/p>\n

But this leads me to another little matter. One of the new Israeli lines on the war runs like this. Israel kills \u201cterrorists\u201d by the score along with a handful of \u201ccollateral damage\u201d innocents \u2013 and the world rages against Israel. Yet isn\u2019t the Syrian regime killing Syrian innocents by the thousand every month? Where are the mass protests, the venting of wrath at Bashar al-Assad? What hypocrisy! But of course, this is in itself a hypocrisy. We know the old \u201cHama rules\u201d of Syria; no one asks us to support them. And comparing Israel\u2019s brutality to that of the Assad regime is playing the old Lord Blair game: we weren\u2019t perfect in Iraq \u2013 but we weren\u2019t as bad as Saddam.<\/p>\n

No. Israel claims to hold the same values as the supposedly moral West. It says that it is fighting \u201cterrorism\u201d in our name as well as its own. It says it is fighting like us. It is playing by our Western rules. We are all Israelis now; that is what we are meant to say. Hamas is our enemy, as well as Israel\u2019s. And so \u2013 for this is the effect \u2013 we too must be contaminated by the war crimes of Israel\u2019s pilots. That, I believe, is why we protest against Israel. Operation Pillar of Cloud must not be committed in our name.<\/p>\n

______________________<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East, based in Beirut.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/strong> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/strong> BARCODE<\/strong> STARTS WITH<\/strong> 729<\/strong>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who set the precedent when it comes to “collateral damage”? The West did. We Westerners set the precedents in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq \u2013 trains, bridges, TV stations, wedding parties, blocks of civilian apartments, you name it \u2013 and now the Israelis can trot along behind and produce, whenever necessary, the same tired list of excuses we invented for NATO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,54,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","category-syria-in-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23273","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=23273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}