On Dec 31, 1:57 am, "\"Lone Wolf\"" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Washington bears guilt for Gaza war crimes
> 29 December 2008
>
> The Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is a war crime for which
> not only the government of Israel but also that of the United States
> bears full responsibility.
>
> The relentless bombing campaign, which in its first 48 hours has left
> at least 300 dead and 1,000 wounded, is a deliberate slaughter of
> innocent civilians and an act of state terror. The toll of casualties,
> many of them women and children, is certain to rise. As Israeli
> Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenaz
> put it, "This is only the beginning."
>
> The pretense that this assault is an act of retaliation for the recent
> scattered rocket attacks that have been carried out against Israeli
> territory from inside Gaza is preposterous. Israel, with the
> collaboration of Washington, has been preparing the current bombing
> campaign and threatened ground assault for months, under the cover of
> the supposed cease-fire with Gaza's Hamas-led administration.
>
> "These people are nothing but thugs," said White House spokesman
> Gordon Johndroe, who insisted that Israel was only acting to "defend
> itself" against "terrorists."
>
> This is the official story that is largely echoed by the mass media
> and endorsed by the leadership of the Democratic Party.
>
> Few bother to point out that not a single Israeli was killed by the
> homemade rockets that supposedly justified Israel launching its Gaza
> bombardments and killing 300 (one Israeli died in a rocket attack
> afterwards.) Such a disproportionate response is hardly an aberration.
> During the last eight years, barely a score of Israelis have died in
> rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza. During the same period, Israeli
> forces have killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians.
>
> Nor is there much concern over the fact that Israel chose to launch
> its bombing in the most crowded and desperately poor urban area on the
> face of the earth precisely at the hour that schoolchildren were
> making their way home. Under these conditions, ritualistic US
> statements urging Israel to "avoid civilian casualties" amount to
> mocking the victims.
>
> Having maligned an entire people as "thugs," the White House has given
> the green light for a bloodbath. More importantly, it has provided the
> indispensable resources for carrying out this crime, assuring Israel
> more than $3 billion a year in US military aid and supplying the IDF
> with the deadly tools of its trade—F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack
> helicopters, TOW and Hellfire missiles and the fuel and spare parts
> needed to keep them in operation.
>
> The dispatches from inside Gaza provide a graphic accounting of what
> Washington got for its arms and money.
>
> Safa Joudeh, a freelance journalist in Gaza City, writes: "There were
> piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you
> looked at them you could see that a few of the young men were still
> alive, someone lifts a hand, and another raises his head. They
> probably died within moments because their bodies were burned, most
> had lost limbs, some of their guts were hanging out and they were all
> lying in pools of blood."
>
> Ewa Jasiewicz reports from Gaza: "We saw a bearded man, on a stretcher
> on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking,
> involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards. A spasm coherent
> with a spinal chord injury. Would he ever walk again or talk again? In
> another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel
> wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile
> bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted,
> repetitive, squeaking sounds."
>
> The Israeli newspaper Haaretz carried a report from its correspondent
> on the scene: "Relatives search among the bodies and the wounded in
> order to bring the dead quickly to burial. A mother whose three school-
> age children were killed, and are piled one on top of the other in the
> morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent."
>
> The New York Times, hardly known for its sympathy for the
> Palestinians, acknowledged: "Still, there was a shocking quality to
> Saturday's attacks, which began in broad daylight as police cadets
> were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market, and
> children were emerging from school.
>
> "The center of Gaza City was a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble
> everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutilated
> bodies were laid out on the pavement and in the lobby of Shifa
> Hospital so that family members could identify them. The dead included
> civilians, including several construction workers and at least two
> children in school uniforms."
>
> This is not self-defense; it is premeditated mass murder. The aim of
> the "shock and awe" campaign, as the assault on Gaza is widely
> described in Israel, is similar to that conducted by the US against
> Iraq—regime change.
>
> Neither the Zionist regime nor Washington accepted the victory of
> Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian election—hailed by the Bush
> administration (before the results were known) as part of a flowering
> of democracy in the Middle East wrought by American militarism.
>
> In response, the US and its Israeli ally did their best to provoke a
> Palestinian civil war and military coup and, when this proved
> ineffective in ousting Hamas from power in Gaza, subjected the
> territory's one-and-a-half million people to relentless collective
> punishment. They imposed a siege that choked off supplies of food,
> medicine, potable water and electricity, condemning masses of people
> to poverty, unemployment, hunger and disease. The present killing
> represents a qualitative escalation of this merciless policy of making
> life for the people of Gaza so intolerable that the Hamas regime would
> fall.
>
> The New York Times Sunday gave a concise analysis of the real
> relationship between the Israeli blockade and the rocket attacks from
> Gaza. The siege, it stated, had led to "the near death of the Gazan
> economy," adding, "While enough food has gone in to avoid starvation,
> the level of suffering is very high and getting worse every week."
>
> Hamas had entered a cease-fire with Israel in a bid to reopen trade
> and alleviate this suffering. While the rocket attacks, supposedly
> Israel's main concern, fell "dramatically in the fall to 15 to 20 a
> month from hundreds a month," the Times noted, "Israel said it would
> not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not
> completely stopped..." It was this intransigence that led to the
> collapse of the Israeli-Hamas cease-fire.
>
> From the outset, Israeli actions have been motivated not by concerns
> for security, but rather by political aims. In the first instance,
> there is the desire to oust the Hamas administration in Gaza. Also in
> play are the desires of the Zionist establishment and military to
> offset the humiliation they suffered in Lebanon in 2006.
>
> For Washington, support for and direct complicity in Israeli war
> crimes is bound up with a wider strategic policy of creating a new
> order in the Middle East, one designed to assure undisputed US
> domination of the region and its oil wealth. Israel represents the
> junior partner in this bloody venture and is allowed to satisfy its
> aggressive appetites because they are seen as furthering US
> imperialist interests.
>
> Regime change in Gaza is viewed by US policymakers as a steppingstone
> to similar changes elsewhere, particularly in Syria and Iran. Indeed,
> the unfolding events in Gaza foreshadow a broader intervention in the
> Middle East and the threat of a new war against Iran.
>
> It is not, it must be noted, merely a question of the US and Israel.
> The assault on Gaza has enjoyed the direct or tacit support of the
> Arab bourgeois regimes, in the first instance that of Egypt, which has
> set up machineguns on its border with Gaza to shoot down fleeing
> Palestinians. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority of President
> Mahmoud Abbas has likewise offered justifications for Israel's crimes.
>
> The Bush administration has pursued its policy in the Middle East with
> relentless violence for the past eight years. There is no indication,
> however, that it will fundamentally change with the transfer of the
> White House to President-elect Barack Obama in less than a month.
>
> Obama has maintained a discreet silence on Gaza, while consulting with
> Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from his vacation home in Hawaii.
> His aides have complacently insisted that there is "one president at a
> time" and it would be inappropriate for the advocate of "change we can
> believe in" to voice an opinion on the slaughter being carried out
> with US-supplied warplanes, bombs and missiles.
>
> Elements of the Zionist establishment in Israel have voiced suspicion
> about Obama's policies, and there have been some suggestions that his
> approaching January 20 inauguration may have played a role in the
> timing of the Israeli assault.
>
> It strains credulity, however, that Israel would have carried out its
> actions without prior consultations not only with the Bush
> administration, but with the Obama camp as well. Rather than trying to
> push through its Gaza attack out of fear of a less sympathetic
> environment in Washington after Obama enters the White House, it is
> far more likely that the Israeli government was doing Obama a favor by
> carrying out a crime that he supported before he had to take public
> responsibility for it.
>
> The reality is that the Democratic president-elect has sworn to
> maintain US support for Israel and has repeatedly defended Israel's
> "right to self-defense," including during its criminal war against
> Lebanon in 2006 and in regard to its repeated attacks on Gaza. He has
> likewise promised to maintain the US pledge of $30 billion in arms aid
> to Israel over the next decade.
>
> Those he has chosen as his top aides—the congressman and former
> Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and his former
> presidential rival Hillary Clinton as secretary of state—are known for
> having criticized the Bush administration for being insufficiently
> supportive of Israeli aggression.
>
> During the election campaign last summer, Obama made a trip to the
> southern Israeli town of Sderot, which had been a target of rocket
> attacks from Gaza, to provide an explicit justification for the kind
> of assault now being waged.
>
> "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters
> sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that,"
> Obama said during the visit. "And I would expect Israelis to do the
> same thing." He uttered not a word of sympathy for the Palestinians
> and gave no indication of what actions he expected from parents in
> Gaza who have watched their children torn to pieces by US-supplied
> bombs and missiles.
>
> Meanwhile, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi issued a
> statement providing an explicit endorsement of the Israeli bombing
> campaign. "When Israel is attacked," she said, "the United States must
> continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."
>
> The response of Obama and the Democrats to the ongoing atrocity in
> Gaza represents a stark warning. Far from representing a last gasp of
> militarist aggression on the part of the lame duck Bush
> administration, the assault on Gaza is an indication of the shape of
> things to come.
>
> The coming to office of the new Democratic administration will not
> spell an end to the crimes associated with US imperialism, but rather
> their continuation. Driven by the deepest economic crisis since the
> Great Depression, American militarism will play an ever more prominent
> role in Washington's desperate struggle against its rivals for the
> domination of dwindling markets and vital resources.
>
> The struggle against war and the fight to hold accountable the authors
> of war crimes from Iraq to Gaza can be advanced only through the
> independent mobilization of the working class in a new mass political
> movement based upon a socialist program.
>
> Bill Van Auken
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