"GAZA: LIFT THE BLOCKADE" - The Relief Convoy on its way

(Source: Gush Shalom mailing list and website)
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Click here to watch video from the convoy (sorry, Hebrew only)

The initiative for the large action that took place today (26.1.08) started when the well-know psychiatrist, Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj, the human-rights activist from Gaza, met in the Gush Shalom office with a small group of Israeli peace activists, in order to tell them about the desperate situation in the strip. It was decided on the spot to organize in Israel a relief convoy for the Gaza Strip people, and to fight by all political and juridical means for the right to get it in. It was agreed that two parallel protest rallies would be held simultaneously on the two sides of the wall.

26 Israeli peace groups joined the initiative, under the single slogan: "Gaza: Lift the siege!" Many activists from different organizations worked day and night. Gush Shalom prepared a special poster and started a fund-raising campaign among its sympathizers. Hundreds of checks came pouring in from Israel and a dozen other countries, enabling the Gush to carry alone the full costs of the supplies. Many added words of thanks for the opportunity given them to express their opinion this way and join the struggle.

Warm thanks to all of them!

In consultation with Dr. al-Sarraj it was decided to buy not only five tons of essential foodstuffs - flour, sugar, rice, oil, salt, beans and lentils - but also water distillers. "The water in the Gaza Strip is undrinkable," al-Sarraj reported, "therefore there is an urgent need for distillers."

The weather forecasts promised rain and thunderstorms all over the country. In spite of this, old and young peace activists came to the starting points in six towns. As requested by the organizers, hundreds of families came in their private cars. Together with the people who came by bus, their number reached about two thousand.

"In the night we were woken up by strong thunderbolts. It started to rain cats and dogs, and we were very worried: who is going to get up early on Shabbat morning in such stormy weather in order to participate in an open-air protest rally and carry sacks of food?" recounted one of the organizers.

Ya'akov Manor had the idea to ask the demonstrators to bring private relief parcels and to add personal letters "from family to family". The response was beyond all expectations. Families brought not only food and mineral water, but also blankets, warm clothing and many other useful articles, even electrical stoves. The parcels were fastened to the tops of the cars or put in the baggage holds of the buses. They added up to two tons.

When the demonstrators assembled in the towns - Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth and others - a slight rain was falling. But all who hoped for a brightening up were soon disappointed: during the drive to the Erez border crossing, a very heavy rain started to pour down, making it almost impossible to see the road, and slowed down the huge convoy towards the Gaza strip extremely difficult.

About half of the protesters were Jewish, the other half Arab. The rally was conducted the same way: Side by side with the Jewish speakers - Uri Avnery, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Professor Jeff Halper and former minister Shulamit Aloni (who was ill and sent a written speech, read by Teddy Katz), speeches were made by advocate Fatmeh al-Ijou, and MKs Izzam Mahul and Jamal Zahalke.

At the height of the rally, the moderator, Huloud al-Badawi, called Dr. Sarraj by cellular phone. He was participating at the parallel rally in Gaza and his words were conveyed by loudspeaker. They amounted to a stirring call to the Israeli peace camp to support the Palestinians in their struggle against the blockade.

A sensation was caused by a young woman from Sderot, Shir Shusdig, who called out: "For seven years I am suffering from the Qassams in Kibbutz Zikim and Sderot. I know that the people on the other side are also suffering very much. That's why I am here!"

Jeff Halper mentioned that demonstrations of solidarity with the people of Gaza were taking place in dozens of cities around the world. Advocate al-Ijou pointed out that the Attorney General had asserted in a Supreme Court hearing that the blockade on Gaza was similar to the boycott against the former apartheid regime in South Africa. "This is absurd when it comes from a government which is building apartheid roads all over the West Bank!"

Miraculously, the rain stopped just before the rally, and started again a few minutes after it was finished.

Since the Israeli army has not allowed the relief supplies into the Gaza strip, they were stored in a neighboring kibbutz. If the military will not permit their transfer to Gaza in the next two days, we shall apply to the High Court of Justice and start a legal fight until we succeed.

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Uri Avnery's speech at the rally:

Three days ago, a wall fell here – Just as the Berlin Wall fell, Just as the apartheid wall will fall, And just as all walls and fences in this country Will come down.

But the inhuman blockade That has been imposed on A million and a half human beings in Gaza By our government By our army, In our name – This siege is continuing in its full cruelty. We, Israelis from various political camps, Have come to bring basic supplies And to say to the Israeli public And to the whole world: We will not participate in crime! We are ashamed of the blockade!”

Our hearts are with our Palestinian brothers Who are at this moment demonstrating with us On the other side of the fence – Don’t lose faith that one day We will meet together in this place Without fences, without walls, Without violence, Without fighting, The sons of two peoples living next to each other In peace, in friendship, in partnership.

Our hearts are with our brothers, the residents of Sderot – The threat of Qassams must stop! It won’t stop by a policy of “an eye for an eye”, Or a hundred eyes for one eye, Or a thousand eyes for one eye, Because that only leaves us all blind. It will end when we speak to the other side – Yes, yes, even with Hamas! And we'll together create a total and mutual ceasefire – Without Qassams, without murderous incursions, Without mortars, without extrajudicial assassinations, Without blockade, without starvation.

This is our call, this is our demand: Set up an immediate ceasefire! Open the crossings immediately! Make peace with all parts of the Palestinian people! MAKE PEACE!”

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Uri Avnery

26.01.08

Worse than a Crime

IT LOOKED like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.

It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place.

The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.

That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008.

ONE MIGHT repeat the famous saying of the French statesman Boulay de la Meurthe, slightly amended: It is worse than a war crime, it is a blunder!

Months ago, the two Ehuds - Barak and Olmert - imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, and boasted about it. Lately they have tightened the deadly noose even more, so that hardly anything at all could be brought into the Strip. Last week they made the blockade absolute - no food, no medicines. Things reached a climax when they stopped the fuel, too. Large areas of Gaza remained without electricity - incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps for water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands remained without heating in the severe cold, unable to cook, running out of food.

Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic. That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily, the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning. Apart from that, the blockade remained total.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid act.

THE REASON given for the starving and freezing of one and a half million human beings, crowded into a territory of 365 square kilometers, is the continued shooting at the town of Sderot and the adjoining villages.

That is a well-chosen reason. It unites the primitive and poor parts of the Israeli public. It blunts the criticism of the UN and the governments throughout the world, who might otherwise have spoken out against a collective punishment that is, undoubtedly, a war crime under international law.

A clear picture is presented to the world: the Hamas terror regime in Gaza launches missiles at innocent Israeli civilians. No government in the world can tolerate the bombardment of its citizens from across the border. The Israeli military has not found a military answer to the Qassam missiles. Therefore there is no other way than to exert such strong pressure on the Gaza population as to make them rise up against Hamas and compel them to stop the missiles.

The day the Gaza electricity works stopped operating, our military correspondents were overjoyed: only two Qassams were launched from the Strip. So it works! Ehud Barak is a genius!

But the day after, 17 Qassams landed, and the joy evaporated. Politicians and generals were (literally) out of their minds: one politician proposed to "act crazier than them", another proposed to "shell Gaza's urban area indiscriminately for every Qassam launched", a famous professor (who is a little bit deranged) proposed the exercise of "ultimate evil".

The government scenario was a repeat of Lebanon War II (the report about which is due to be published in a few days). Then: Hizbullah captured two soldiers on the Israeli side of the border, now: Hamas fired on towns and villages on the Israeli side of the border. Then: the government decide in haste to start a war, now: the government decided in haste to impose a total blockade. Then: the government ordered the massive bombing of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hizbullah, now: the government decided to cause massive suffering of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hamas.

The results were the same in both cases: the Lebanese population did not rise up against Hizbullah, but on the contrary, people of all religious communities united behind the Shiite organization. Hassan Nasrallah became the hero of the entire Arab world. And now: the population unites behind Hamas and accuses Mahmoud Abbas of cooperation with the enemy. A mother who has no food for her children does not curse Ismail Haniyeh, she curses Olmert, Abbas and Mubarak.

SO WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.

What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.

Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.

A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations and the blockade.

Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?

Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.

Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas - because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance - than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence.

IT HAS been said before that it is dangerous to write satire in our country - too often the satire becomes reality. Some readers may recall a satirical article I wrote months ago. In it I described the situation in Gaza as a scientific experiment designed to find out how far one can go, in starving a civilian population and turning their lives into hell, before they raise their hands in surrender.

This week, the satire has become official policy. Respected commentators declared explicitly that Ehud Barak and the army chiefs are working on the principle of "trial and error" and change their methods daily according to results. They stop the fuel to Gaza, observe how this works and backtrack when the international reaction is too negative. They stop the delivery of medicines, see how it works, etc. The scientific aim justifies the means.

The man in charge of the experiment is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a man of many ideas and few scruples, a man whose whole turn of mind is basically inhuman. He is now, perhaps, the most dangerous person in Israel, more dangerous than Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu, dangerous to the very existence of Israel in the long run.

The man in charge of execution is the Chief of Staff. This week we had the chance of hearing speeches by two of his predecessors, generals Moshe Ya'alon and Shaul Mofaz, in a forum with inflated intellectual pretensions. Both were discovered to have views that place them somewhere between the extreme Right and the ultra-Right. Both have a frighteningly primitive mind. There is no need to waste a word about the moral and intellectual qualities of their immediate successor, Dan Halutz. If these are the voices of the three last Chiefs of Staff, what about the incumbent, who cannot speak out as openly as they? Has this apple fallen further from the tree?

Until three days ago, the generals could entertain the opinion that the experiment was succeeding. The misery in the Gaza Strip had reached its climax. Hundreds of thousands were threatened by actual hunger. The chief of UNRWA warned of an impending human catastrophe. Only the rich could still drive a car, heat their homes and eat their fill. The world stood by and wagged its collective tongue. The leaders of the Arab states voiced empty phrases of sympathy without raising a finger.

Barak, who has mathematical abilities, could calculate when the population would finally collapse.

AND THEN something happened that none of them foresaw, in spite of the fact that it was the most foreseeable event on earth.

When one puts a million and a half people in a pressure cooker and keeps turning up the heat, it will explode. That is what happened at the Gaza-Egypt border.

At first there was a small explosion. A crowd stormed the gate, Egyptian policemen opened live fire, dozens were wounded. That was a warning.

The next day came the big attack. Palestinian fighters blew up the wall in many places. Hundreds of thousands broke out into Egyptian territory and took a deep breath. The blockade was broken.

Even before that, Mubarak was in an impossible situation. Hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion Muslims, saw how the Israeli army had closed the Gaza strip off on three sides: the North, the East and the sea. The fourth side of the blockade was provided by the Egyptian army.

The Egyptian president, who claims the leadership of the entire Arab world, was seen as a collaborator with an inhuman operation conducted by a cruel enemy in order to gain the favor (and the money) of the Americans. His internal enemies, the Muslim Brothers, exploited the situation to debase him in the eyes of his own people.

It is doubtful if Mubarak could have persisted in this position. But the Palestinian masses relieved him of the need to make a decision. They decided for him. They broke out like a tsunami wave. Now he has to decide whether to succumb to the Israeli demand to re-impose the blockade on his Arab brothers.

And what about Barak's experiment? What's the next step? The options are few:

(a) To re-occupy Gaza. The army does not like the idea. It understands that this would expose thousands of soldiers to a cruel guerilla war, which would be unlike any intifada before.

(b) To tighten the blockade again and exert extreme pressure on Mubarak, including the use of Israeli influence on the US Congess to deprive him of the billions he gets every year for his services.

(c) To turn the curse into a blessing, by handing the Strip over to Mubarak, pretending that this was Barak's hidden aim all along. Egypt would have to safeguard Israel's security, prevent the launching of Qassams and expose its own soldiers to a Palestinian guerilla war - when it thought it was rid of the burden of this poor and barren area, and after the infrastructure there has been destroyed by the Israeli occupation. Probably Mubarak will say: Very kind of you, but no thanks.

The brutal blockade was a war crime. And worse: it was a stupid blunder.

permlink http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1201278309/

Gaza: the Empire strikes back (and risks loosing Egypt in the process)

It was the be expected: the Pharaoh, who had been told by his masters that he was expected to "solve the problem" moved his stormtroopers in to attempt to close the border between Egypt and Gaza. Simultaneously, the Empire sensing that the situation might be getting out of control at the United Nations moved to prevent the adoption of a UNSC resolution on the blockade of Gaza. Lastly, Israel carried out to airstrikes close to the Rafah crossing and killed senior Hamas officials.

The USraelian Empire's response to the collapse of the Gaza Wall is now clear: put the burden of handling the political fallout from the clashes with the Palestinians on Mubarak and get the rest of the world to turn its attention away from the resulting violence. This was all very predictable. What will be interesting to observe will be Hamas' reaction to these developments.

So far, I have seen no reports of Hamas forces taking action to keep the border open or to protect the Palestinians from Mubarak's goons. Hamas needs to take a strategic decision to either a) get a secret understanding with Mubarak that the border will not really be shut down again, or b) to openly defy him and engage any force attempting to restore the status quo ante. But 'engaging' does not necessarily mean using armed force

The most effective tactic, a least for the time being, is probably get as many Gazans as possible to demonstrate and protest against Mubarak's betrayal. There should be a continuous presence of 100'000 Gazans ON the border 24/7.

The key here is to set up Mubarak politically *before* engaging his forces on the ground. Hamas will have to constantly keep in mind the following strategic factors:

1) Hamas simply cannot allow the border to be closed down again. Ever. It can allow a semblance of control and a "face-saving fig leaf" (-: Mubarak deserves no less :-) for the Pharaoh, but the blockade on Gaza should not be allowed to be reimposed.

2) Egypt is not the "Jewish state". Civil disobedience, non-violent protest and conventional rioting will have an impact upon Mubarak's ability to act. Hamas should only use guns in strict self-defense as the main 'weapon' in the hands of Hamas is a political one: the Arab public opinion.

3) Hamas should make full use of the fact that Mubarak is hated by the Egyptian street by coordinating actions of mass protest against Mubarak's collaborationist policies with the opposition forces throughout Egypt.

Ideally - Mubarak should be pushed in the exact same corner where the Shah of Iran was placed by the Iranian opposition: a political quicksand in which each movement of the regime brings it one step closer to death.

The boundless arrogance of the Empire whose leaders cannot even begin to imagine that a bunch of "bearded Islamists" could actually take control of Egypt (something truly apocalyptic for the Imperial policies in the Middle-East)

Conclusion: Ægypto Delenda Est (Egypt must fall)

From the Palestinian point of view Egypt is definitely the weak link the the Imperial chain shackling the Palestinians in general, and Gaza in particular. The latest developments have only made this fundamental truth more obvious. Consequently, the Palestinians need to use all their considerable political power in the Arab and Muslim world to push Mubarak to either follow Musharraf's example and become a de-facto buffer between the Empire and the Palestinians or the Shah's example and loose it all.

It is also crucial for Hamas never to forget, not for one second, that neither the USA nor Israel will ever be able to move in to protect Mubarak. All Mubarak has are his "security forces" and the corrupt cronies living off the billions his regime gets from the USA.

Egypt is a ripe (although "rotten" might be a better term) fruit, ready to be plucked by the Resistance forces and Gaza border might just be the place to make that happen.

"You Owe Mr. Bush An Apology"

Hamas shows IDF who is in charge - pragmatic analysis by Haaretz

Haaretz Analysis: Hamas shows IDF who is in charge

By Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents (emphasis added. VS)

A few Israel Defense Forces Engineering Corps officers surely shed a tear yesterday while viewing the television reports from Rafah: The barrier built by the IDF with blood and sweat along the Philadelphi Route, on the Gaza Strip border with Egypt, was coming down.

It was, apparently, the final remnant of Israel's years of occupying the Strip. But Israel has better reasons to be worried by what happened yesterday. In destroying the wall separating the Palestinian and Egyptian sides of Rafah, Hamas chalked up a real coup. Not only did the organization demonstrate once again that it is a disciplined, determined entity, and an opponent that is exponentially more sophisticated than the Palestine Liberation Organization. It also took the sting out of the economic blockade plan devised by Israel's military establishment, an idea whose effectiveness was doubtful from the beginning but whose potential for international damage was not.

Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are now forced to find a new joint border control arrangement, one that will probably depend on the good graces of Hamas. If the PA is indeed interested in taking responsibility for the border crossings, as Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has declared, it will have to negotiate with Hamas even though President Mahmoud Abbas is trying to avoid that at any cost. The other option - to leave the border untended - is even worse.

The Hamas action yesterday was anything but spontaneous. It was another stage in the campaign that began in Gaza's night of darkness on Sunday. As Gaza was plunged into widely televised blackness, Palestinian children armed with candles were brought out on a protest march and organized into prime-time demonstrations in support of the Egyptian and Jordanian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Tuesday, Hamas put together a violent demonstration that ended in a confrontation with Egyptian police officers at the border, and, as usual, broadcast live on Al-Jazeera. Apparently it was enough to make Egypt lose its appetite for confrontation.

Yesterday, tens of thousands of people burst through to the west. President Hosni Mubarak explained that he instructed his police officers not to block the hungry on their way to grocery stores in El-Arish and the Egyptian side of Rafah.

Mubarak also had to contend with domestic politics. The violent suppression of the Palestinian masses would have turned up the tension between him and the Muslim Brotherhood, or Al-Jazeera. More than a few Arab commentators now see the Qatar-based satellite channel as the superpower of the Arab world. In many cases its broadcasts clearly promote an Islamic agenda. (utter nonsense. VS)

Explosions were set at 20 points along the border fence, clear evidence of a campaign that was planned and coordinated well in advance. Israeli intelligence officials will have to explain, to themselves and the country's leaders, whether and how the preparations took place without their knowledge - another Gaza goof, in the wake of the Hamas election victory in January 2006 and the rapid military drubbing it gave Fatah in the Strip last June.

Most of the Gazans who crossed into Egypt are expected to return home within a few days, after stocking up on staples and meeting with relatives they have not seen for years. Meanwhile, Egyptian security forces set up dozens of checkpoints to prevent the Gazans from spreading into other areas of Sinai.
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Comment: the Israeli press, to its credit, often shows a remarkable level of lucidity and critical thinking which puts the US corporate media to shame. Haaretz in particular has, for a long time already, proven to be one of the best news sources of the Middle-East (along with the equally excellent Al-Jazeera). This latest article is an example of this capability to offer a pragmatic analysis of events (setting aside the silly comment about Al-Jazeera being "Islamic" - something which anyone who has ever watched this TV channel knows is utter baloney).

Turkish-Israeli intelligence cooperation bolstered by high-level contacts

The following was sent to me by a correspondent to whom I am very grateful for this interesting item. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the translation. VS

ANKA News Agency, 21 January 2008

Former Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak will visit Turkey in February at the invitation of his Turkish counterpart Vecdi Gönül.

Diplomatic sources said that the purpose of Barak's visit to Turkey is to maintain dialogue between the two countries in the field of defense.

Problems relating to the security of the region, co-operation in the field of defense industry and "intelligence sharing" in the fight against terrorism will be on the agenda. In this context, an increase in intelligence co-operation is expected.

It was noted that the issue of Chief of the Turkish General Staff Ya şar Büyükanıt's postponed visit to Israel may also be raised during this visit.

(link to the original item in Turkish: http://www.haber7.com/haber.php?haber_id=294658)

The situation in Gaza is the proof of a stunning Israeli intelligence failure

The developments in Gaza are the proof that the Israeli intelligence services are the most over-rated on the planet. Long gone is the "Entebbe" image of a daring and all-knowing Israeli intelligence community and as more information comes in about the recent developments in Gaza one is lead to wonder how incompetent the Israelis really are.

Times Online has revealed that Hamas 'spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation' and that the Islamist group was responsible and had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches. That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations after midnight last night the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man's land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt. Lieutenant Abu Usama of the Palestinian National Security, said of the cutting operation: "I've seen this happening over the last few months. It happened in the daytime but was covered up so that nobody would see."

This begs the question of how the Israeli security complex (for which 1 in 6 Israelis works directly or indirectly) could miss something like this being prepared for months right under its nose? Israel has total intelligence control over Gaza. With numerous listening facilities monitoring all communications in and out of Gaza, with many times of drones flying over this small piece of land, with presumably hundreds of Palestinians agents (recruited in Israeli jails) providing human intelligence (HUMINT) it is baffling to see that, yet again, the Israelis seem to have been caught off guard.

This goes way beyond the narrow intelligence collection issue though.

Even more baffling is the question of how Israeli analysts failed to predict that a blockade would built the pressure towards some type of action towards Egypt. There are plenty of sharp Israeli analysts who could have made such a prediction and my sense is that the Israeli intelligence community is suffering from the same kind of politicization which has so catastrophically crippled the US intelligence community: the 'nay-sayers' and other critical minds are forced out and only ass-kissing bureaucrats are left to do the job.

In a way, Gaza is "Israel's 911": a vivid proof of a systemic dysfunction, a manifestation of a decay and collapse of a socio-political structure wholly unable to cope with its environment. An Empire relying on the two most incompetent and ineffective intelligence communities in the world (the USA 's and the Israeli) cannot survive for very long, not when faced with sophisticated and highly capable foes. As the saying goes, "the fish rots from the head".

The blockade of Gaza? It's just a poor public relations issue! A case study in "Chutzpah"

I have never understood where the myth of the 'clever Israelis' came from (probably from the 'superior Jewish intellect' canard, itself a blatantly self-serving and racist belief). Today, the Israeli handling of the Hamas phenomenon appears to me as an ideal case study in stupidity and arrogance. I just came across such a perfect example of this delusional arrogance that I decided that I needed to share it with you.

Watch this 'security expert' explaining on Israeli TV how the world wide outrage over the Israeli policies towards Gaza is just, well, the result of bad PR. Heck! If the Prime Miniser had a specialist in charge of political spin Israeli policies would be far better understood. Just listen to this guy:



Amazing, isn't it? What I really would like to know is what percentage of Israelis today really believe that crap? Judging from the comment by a citizen from Haifa I posted at the bottom my analysis of the Gaza situation (see under 'update'), at least some are fully aware of the idiocy of such theories.

Bottom line: Chutzpah is not the same thing as intelligence or foresight, and while the Israelis seem to have the former in abundant supply, the latter is - by definition - something which is mutually exclusive with arrogance and self-worship.

350,000 Gazans stream into Egypt - situation explosive: an analysis (updated!)

According to the United Nations, some 350,000 Gazans have streamed into Egypt after Hamas militants blew up dozens of holes in the metal wall which separated Gaza from Egypt. Most of the wall is now destroyed.

Obviously, while this is good news for the Gazans starved by the Israeli blockade, this development is also full of potential dangers.

It is unlikely that Hamas will stop the firing of Kassam rockets across the border into Israel unless Israel agrees to stop the bombings and 'targeted assassinations' it has been conducing for months in Gaza. Israel has refused, so far, to agree to a ceasefire. With its blockade of Gaza now partially, but not fully, compromised, Israel has a number of different, but equally dangerous options facing it.

1) Retaking control of the Gaza-Egyptian border and re-building the wall. That would be a potentially dangerous operation which could potentially involved the Egyptian forces whose loyalty to the Mubarak regime cannot be counted on. However, from a military point of view this is a no-brainer. The Rafah crossing is just a couple of miles for the Israeli border and shutting it down would not even require a re-invasion of Gaza itself.

2) Getting Mubarak to do Israel's dirty job for them. Using Egyptian forces to re-close the border would be politically very dangerous for Mubarak (who is already sitting on an Islamist powder keg himself) and could result in the violence spreading into Egypt proper.

3) Using other, unspecified, forces (EU, USA, NATO, etc.). Frankly, that is not an option at all. These forces would be either unreliable or sitting ducks for Hamas strikes.

4) Israel could use that pretext to re-invade Gaza or, at least, large chunks of it. That is, alas, probably the most feasible option for the Israelis as from a purely military perspective the opening of the border does not fundamentally alter the equation.

5) Do nothing and just demand that the Egyptians fix the problem. That is, so far, what the Israelis have done and there is some logic to this: it avoids a massive military involvement and it is politically convenient, at least in the short term, as it places the burden to take action on others. Also, we should mention here that unless the Egyptians and Palestinians do some engineering work together the destruction of the border will not completely ease the blockade: the "heavy" issues of sewage, electricity and gas will not be fixed by people crossing the border.

What is certain is that time is of the essence. The longer this border remains in Hamascontrol the harder it will be for anyone to close it down again. So what will happen if the border does remain open?

That might look like a tempting idea for the Israelis: just make Gaza Mubarak's problem, just give it to the Egyptians and make it their headache. Except that the Palestinians are not Egyptians, except that Hamas has absolutely no desire or incentive to comply with any Egyptian demands or terms, not after having successfully liberated Gaza from the Israelis, except that Gaza will never be Egyptian. And this is the key factor which needs to be fully appreciated:

Gaza is now the first successfully liberated part of Palestine. It was liberated without any deals with, or concessions to, the occupying forces and it was liberated by the force of arms. Unless the Israelis re-occupy Gaza there is nothing which can alter this reality.

Hamas, alone and isolated, achieved in a short time Gaza what the PLO and Fatah failed to achieve in many years in spite of their endless and protracted negotiations with the occupier, concessions, brutal internal repression, in spite of the full support of the US imperial might and in spite of the Saudi money. Gaza is now the living monument to the futility of negotiating with Israel and the USA, the living proof that the collaborationist policies of Fatah only benefited Abbas and his Ramallah minions.

In the short term, there can, alas, be no doubt as to the best course of action for Israel: re-occupy most, if not all, of Gaza. That, however, is in total contradiction with the over-arching main Israeli political priority: to retain a Jewish majority in Israel while avoiding the kind of collapse which brought down the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

Hamas has been extremely skilled at bringing out this fundamental contradiction between the short term and long term goals of Israel. Hamas has brilliantly played the "Gaza' card and has succeeded in thwarting the plans of Israel, Fatah, Mubarak, the USA, the Saudis, the EU and everybody else from the so called "international community".

One has to give credit where credit is due: for the first time since the creation of Israel, the Palestinian people appear to be in the process of producing a force and a strategy which might force the Israelis to sit down and, for the first time ever, seriously negotiate with the Palestinians to achieve by mutual agreement what they failed to achieve by force and terror.

My guess is that currently the Israelis are simply not ready to look reality in the eye and that they will go for a short term fix: re-occupy Gaza. Olmert and his clique are just not the kind of people who are capable of vision, nor are they politically strong enough to appear to "negotiate with terrorists" (they could not even negotiate to free Gilad Shalit!).

It appears that at least for the foreseeable future, there will be a lot more blood uselessly shed only because the Israelis are arrogant, delusional and, frankly, plain stupid. However, the "writing is on the wall" and no amount of short term terror will wipe it off: Israel will eventually have to sit down and sue for peace with the real representatives of the Palestinian people.
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Also check out this very good Al-Jazeera report on the latest developments:





Update: I just found this insightful commentary in the discussion of a Haaretz article about the situation:

Title: The March of Folly - we never learn ... Name: Bruno City: Haifa State:

By acting foolishly and arrogantly, we have brought this upon ourselves. By pushing innocent Gazans into an inhuman and undeserved corner, what did we expect them to do? sit and freeze and starve? Maybe now we`ll realise that there IS a government in Gaza, even if we don`t like it, and begin dealing with them in a pragmatic way - they have a lot to lose, and can and should be held accountable for their actions. But Israel`s government should also be held accountable for ITS actions. Hopefully we will see Mr Olmert resign very shortly ... though I doubt it somehow.

Hezbollah Didn't Do Argentine Bombing (updated)

Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

by GARETH PORTER

posted online on January 18, 2008 here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter

Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."

This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.

A 'Wall of Assumptions'

US policy toward the bombing was skewed from the beginning by a Clinton Administration strategy of isolating Iran, adopted in 1993 as part of an understanding with Israel on peace negotiations with the Palestinians. On the very day of the crime, before anything could have been known about who was responsible, Secretary of State Warren Christopher blamed "those who want to stop the peace process in the Middle East"--an obvious reference to Iran.

William Brencick, then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation, recalled in an interview with me last June that a "wall of assumptions" guided the US approach to the case. The primary assumptions, Brencick said, were that the explosion was a suicide bombing and that use of a suicide bomb was prima facie evidence of involvement by Hezbollah--and therefore Iran.

But the suicide-bomber thesis quickly encountered serious problems. In the wake of the explosion, the Menem government asked the United States to send a team to assist in the investigation, and two days after the bombing, experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrived in Buenos Aires along with three FBI agents. According to an interview the head of the team, ATF explosives expert Charles Hunter, gave to a team of independent investigators headed by US journalist Joe Goldman and Argentine investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, as soon as the team arrived the federal police put forward a thesis that a white Renault Trafic van had carried the bomb that destroyed the AMIA.

Hunter quickly identified major discrepancies between the car-bomb thesis and the blast pattern recorded in photos. He wrote a report two weeks later noting that in the wake of the bombing, merchandise in a store immediately to the right of the AMIA was tightly packed against its front windows and merchandise in another shop had been blown out onto the street--suggesting that the blast came from inside rather than outside. Hunter also said he did not understand how the building across the street could still be standing if the bomb had exploded in front of the AMIA, as suggested by the car-bomb thesis.

The lack of eyewitness evidence supporting the thesis was just as striking. Of some 200 witnesses on the scene, only one claimed to have seen a white Renault Trafic. Several testified they were looking at the spot where the Trafic should have been when the explosion occurred and saw nothing. Nicolasa Romero, the wife of a Buenos Aires policeman, was that lone witness. She said she saw a white Renault Trafic approach the corner where she was standing with her sister and her 4-year-old son. But Romero's sister testified that the vehicle that passed them was not a white Trafic but rather a black-and-yellow taxi. Other witnesses reported seeing a black-and-yellow taxi seconds before the explosion.

Argentine prosecutors argued that pieces of a white Trafic imbedded in the flesh of many of the victims of the explosion proved their case for a suicide bomb. But that evidence was discredited by Gabriel Levinas, a researcher for AMIA's own legal team. Levinas is a member of a leading Jewish family in Buenos Aires who had published a human rights magazine during the dictatorship (his uncle's car was used to kidnap war criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirit him off to Israel for trial in 1961.)

He discovered that the manufacturer of the white Trafic had been sent fragments of the vehicle recovered by the police for analysis and had found that none of the pieces had ever been put under high temperature. That meant that these car fragments could not have come from the particular white Trafic that police had identified as the suicide bomb car--since that vehicle was known to have once caught fire before having been recycled and repaired.

Yet despite the lack of eyewitness testimony and the weakness of the forensic evidence, the State Department publicly embraced the suicide-bomb story in 1994 and 1995.

The Problem of Motive

Independent investigators have also long puzzled over why Iran would have carried out an action against Argentine Jews while its Hezbollah allies were embroiled in armed struggle with the Israeli military in Lebanon. In their 2006 indictment of several Iranian nationals in the bombing, Argentine prosecutors argued that Iran planned the AMIA attack because Carlos Menem's administration had abruptly canceled two contracts for the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran.

But the indictment actually provides excerpts from key documents that undermine that conclusion. According to a February 10, 1992, cable from Argentina's ambassador in Iran, the director of the American Department of Iran's foreign ministry had "emphasized the need to reach a solution to the problem [of nuclear technology transfer] that would avoid damage to other contracts." Iran thus clearly signaled its hope of finding a negotiated solution that could reactivate the suspended contracts and maintain other deals with Argentina as well.

On March 17, 1992, a bomb blast destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires--an incident for which the Argentine prosecutors also held Iran responsible. The indictment, however, quotes a top official of INVAP, an Argentine nuclear firm that dominated the National Commission on Atomic Energy, as saying that during 1992 there were "contacts" between INVAP and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran "in the expectation that the decision of the national government would be revised, allowing the tasks in the contracts to be resumed." The same official confirmed that negotiations surrounding the two canceled projects continued from 1993 to 1995--before and after the AMIA explosion. Those revelations suggest that the Iranian attitude toward Argentina at the time of the bombing was exactly the opposite of the one claimed in the indictment.

The Hezbollah motive for involvement in the AMIA bombing, according to the indictment, was revenge against the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley in early 1994 and the Israeli kidnapping of Shiite leader Mustapha Dirani in May. That theory fails to explain, however, why Hezbollah would choose to retaliate against Jews in Argentina. It was already at war with the Israeli forces in Lebanon, where the group was employing suicide bomb attacks in an effort to pressure Israel to end its occupation. Hezbollah had a second easy retaliatory option available, which was to launch Katyusha rockets across the border into Israeli territory.

That is exactly what Hezbollah did to retaliate for the Israeli killing of some 100 Lebanese civilians in the town of Qana in 1996. That episode inspired greater anger toward Israel among Hezbollah militants than any other event in the 1990s, according to Boston University Hezbollah specialist Augustus Richard Norton. If Hezbollah responded to this Israeli provocation with Katyusha rockets on Israeli territory, it hardly makes sense that it would have responded to a lesser Israeli offense by designing an ambitious international attack on Argentine Jews with no connection to the Israeli occupation.

The Frame-up

The keystone of the Argentine case was Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a used-car salesman with a record of shady dealings with both criminals and the police--and a Shiite last name. On July 10, 1994, Telleldin sold the white Trafic the police claimed was the suicide car to a man he described as having a Central American accent. Nine days after the bombing Telleldin was arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice to the crime.

The police claimed they were led to Telleldin by the serial number on the van's engine block, which was found in the rubble. But it would have been a remarkable lapse for the organizers of what was otherwise a very professional bombing to have left intact such a visible identification mark, one that any car thief knows how to erase. That should have been a clue that the attack was likely not orchestrated by Hezbollah, whose bomb experts were well-known by US intelligence analysts to have been clever enough, in blowing up the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983, to avoid leaving behind any forensic evidence that would lead back to them. It should also have raised questions about whether that evidence was planted by the police themselves.

It is now clear that the Menem government's real purpose in arresting Telleldin was to get him to finger those they wanted to blame for the bombing. In January 1995, Telleldin was visited by retired army Capt. Hector Pedro Vergez, a part-time agent for SIDE, the Argentine intelligence agency, who offered him $1 million and his freedom if he would identify one of five Lebanese nationals detained in Paraguay in September 2004--men the CIA said might be Hezbollah militants--as the person to whom he had sold the van. After Telleldin refused to go along with the scheme, an Argentine judge found that there was no evidence on which to detain the alleged militants.

The Buenos Aires court, which threw out the case against Telleldin in 2004, determined that a federal judge, Luisa Riva Aramayo, met with Telleldin in 1995 to discuss another possibility--paying him to testify that he had sold the van to several high-ranking figures in the Buenos Aires provincial police who were allies of Menem's political rival, Eduardo Duhalde. In July 1996, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who was overseeing the investigation, offered Telleldin $400,000 to implicate those police officers as accomplices in the bombing. (A videotape made secretly by SIDE agents and aired on television in April 1997 showed Galeano negotiating the bribe.) A month after making the offer to Telleldin, Galeano charged three senior Buenos Aires police officials with having involvement in the bombing, based on Telleldin's testimony.

"The Whole Iran Thing Seemed Kind of Flimsy"

In an interview last May James Cheek, Clinton's Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told me, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled. Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the US Mission in Buenos Aires, confirmed Cheek's account. He recalled that investigators found nothing linking Iran to the bombing. "The whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," Goddard said.

James Bernazzani, then the head of the FBI's Hezbollah office, was directed in October 1997 to assemble a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires and put the AMIA case to rest. Bernazzani, now head of the agency's New Orleans office, recalled in a November 2006 interview how he arrived to find that the Argentine investigation of the AMIA bombing had found no real evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement. The only clues suggesting an Iranian link to the bombing at that time, according to Bernazzani, were a surveillance tape of Iranian cultural attache Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic van and an analysis of telephone calls made in the weeks before the bombing.

Shortly after the bombing, the biggest Buenos Aires daily newspaper, Clarin, published a story, leaked to it by Judge Galeano, that Argentine intelligence had taped Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic "months" before the bombing. A summary of the warrants for the arrest of Rabbani and six other Iranians in 2006 continued to refer to "indisputable documents" proving that Rabbani had visited car dealers to look for a van like the one allegedly used in the bombing. In fact, the intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani submitted to Galeano ten days after the bombing shows that the day Rabbani looked at a car dealer's white Trafic was May 1, 1993--fifteen months before the bombing and long before Argentine prosecutors have claimed Iran decided to target AMIA.

In the absence of any concrete evidence, SIDE turned to "link analysis" of telephone records to make a circumstantial case for Iranian guilt. The SIDE analysts argued that a series of telephone calls made between July 1 and July 18, 1994, to a mobile phone in the Brazilian border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the "operational group" for the bombing--and that a call allegedly made on a cellphone belonging to Rabbani could be connected to this same group. The FBI's Bernazzani told me he was appalled by SIDE's use of link analysis to establish responsibility. "It can be very dangerous," he told me. "Using that analysis, you could link my telephone to bin Laden's." Bernazzani said the conclusions reached by the Argentine investigators were merely "speculation" and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence pointing to Iran.

Then, in 2000, one more defector surfaced with a new tale of Iranian responsibility. Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed he was once the third-ranking man in Iran's intelligence services, told Galeano the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made at a meeting of senior Iranian officials, including President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on August 14, 1993. But Mesbahi was soon discredited. Bernazzani told me American intelligence officials believed that by 2000, Mesbahi had long since lost his access to Iranian intelligence, that he was "poor, even broke" and ready to "provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran."

A Questionable Informant

Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation.

The official story is that Berro's name was passed on to SIDE and the CIA by a Lebanese informant in June 2001. The informant claimed he had befriended a former Hezbollah chauffeur and assistant to top Hezbollah leaders named Abu Mohamad Yassin, who told him that a Hezbollah militant named "Brru" was the suicide bomber. That story is suspicious on several counts, the most obvious being that intelligence agencies almost never reveal the name, or even the former position, of an actual informant.

The September 2003 court testimony of Patricio Pfinnen, the SIDE official in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation until he was fired in January 2002, casts serious doubt on the informant's credibility. Pfinnen testified that when he and his colleagues went back to the informant with more questions, "something went wrong with the information, or they were lying to us." Pfinnen said his team ultimately discarded the Berro theory because the sources in Lebanon had "failed and were not certain." He concluded, "I have my doubts about [Berro] being the person who was immolated."

After Pfinnen was fired in a power struggle within the intelligence agency, SIDE named Berro as the suicide bomber in a secret report. In March 2003, just after that report was completed, Ha'aretz reported that the Mossad had not only identified the bomber as Berro but possessed a transcript of Berro's farewell telephone call to Lebanon before the bombing, during which he told his parents that he was going to "join" his brother, who had been killed in a suicide bombing in Lebanon. When the 2006 indictment was released, however, it became clear that no evidence of such a call existed.

In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They visited Detroit, Michigan, where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.

In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing.

Bernazzani told me that the FBI team in Buenos Aires had discovered DNA evidence that was assumed to have come from the suicide bomber in an evidence locker, and Nisman took a DNA sample from one of Berro's brothers during his visit in September 2005. "I would assume, though I don't know, that once we got the brother's DNA, they compared them," he said. But Nisman claimed to a reporter in 2006 that samples had been contaminated. Significantly, the Argentine indictment of the Iranians makes no mention of the DNA evidence.

Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.

Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."

A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.
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Listen to the interview of Gareth Porter with Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio here: http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_01_21_porter.mp3

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Commentary: I would like to add a few words here to all that Gareth Porter has written and said. Argentina, a country I know very well, is one of the few countries in the world were real, genuine, Nazis lived. There has always been a large German colony in Argentina and, after World War II many Nazis were welcomed as refugees by Juan Peron who had many personal friends amongst them.

These Nazis had a great deal of influence on the right wing politics of Argentina and one could even purchase reprint copies of the Völkischer Beobachter in the subway of Buenos-Aires.

Argentina also used to be one of the countries with the highest percentage of Jew anywhere in the world, most of them concentrated in the capital Buenos-Aires. Many of them were very active in Argentinian politics including quite a few in the various Marxist guerilla movements such as "Montoneros", the "Tupamaros" or the infamous "ERP" (People's Revolutionary Army). Jews were also active in the unions, the student movements and the left-wing press. As a result, the Nazi-influenced right wing political parties absolutely hated the Jews and their propaganda constantly spoke of defending the 'Raza Criolla' (the 'real' Argentinians) against the 'Judeo-Masonic conspiracy' to destroy the country.

The Argentinian military used to be heavily infiltrated by such right-wing anti-Jewish elements and after the end of the military rule and the coming to power of Raul Alfonsin many blamed "the Jews" for all that had happened.

There was never any doubt in my mind that the Argentinian bombings were the result of a local, home-grown, anti-Jewish terrorist group, possibly liked with the elite "Carapintadas" commandos of the armed forces. As Gareth Porter mentions it in his interview with Scott Horton, these were the people who had motive and opportunity and, most importantly, the means to cover it all up.

The Israelis, who always had a strong network of agents in Argentina, could not have been unaware of all this. What they, and the Americans, did is blame it all on Hezbollah and Iran for political propaganda purposes. Under such circumstances it is not unreasonable to assume that the US and Israel might have had prior knowledge of what was about to happen. That would explain the quasi-instantaneous finger pointing at Iran and Hezbollah without any signs pointing in that direction (even indirectly).

Lastly, the Argentinian judicial system is corrupt beyond belief and heavily penetrated by pro-Israeli elements. To get some politically motivated indictments would have been just about the easiest thing for the Israelis or the CIA.

Thanks to Gareth Porter, one of the biggest propaganda myths against Hezbollah and Iran is finally biting the dust.

US and Israel placed on Canada torture countries list, then make Canada heel

Israel's Nuclear Missile Threat against Iran

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7838

Global Research, January 19, 2008

“What troubles me is that perhaps the Americans will attack Iran. (...) That would thrust us [Israel] into a war and the home front [in opposition to Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, and Syria] is not ready [yet].” Major-General Ze’evi-Farkash, former Chief of Israel Military Intelligence (March 4, 2007) In the former Yugoslavia, militarily the NATO campaign was a failure in defeating the Yugoslav military. It was because of the harsh targeting of civilian infrastructure and the slaughter of civilians that Yugoslavia decided to surrender. The Iranians have learned a great deal from watching the indiscriminate bombardment of Belgrade and Baghdad. The Yugoslavs and the Iraqis did not posses air power or strong air defences, but the Iranians have been working precisely on this matter through the development of their domestic missile industry. It is Tehran’s missile technology, which distinguishes Iran from Yugoslavia and Iraq. Syria: A Strategic Objective for Israel It was the Iranian missile arsenal, along with the fact that the Israelis did not penetrate far enough into Lebanese territory, which prevented the Israelis from expanding their July 2006 war on Lebanon into Syria. Syria was one of the three strategic objectives for the Israelis and the international mainstream media was preparing the public for an outbreak of war between Israel and Syria. [1] The Syrian government was also openly bracing itself for war. [2] Israel wanted to invade Damascus through the vulnerable Lebanese-Syrian border instead of the heavily fortified Israeli-Syrian frontier. However, the Israelis underestimated the strength of the Lebanese Resistance and were not prepared to confront Iran and the Iranian missile arsenal during July of 2006. In March 2007, thousands of U.S. and Israeli troops amassed in the Negev Desert of Israel in their fourth joint exercise, code-named “Juniper Cobra.” This exercise was designed to test U.S. and Israeli air defence systems.[3] The exercise was portrayed as routine, but the purpose of the Israeli air defence system was originally created in the 1990s on the assumption of an eventual military confrontation with Syria, Iraq, and Iran. These 2007 Israeli-U.S. war games were in response to a series of Iranian military exercises and missile tests conducted since 2006. Iranian missile and rocket technology has developed to a level where Iran has successfully launched its first space rocket into orbit and is preparing its own satellite launches. [4] The Israeli-U.S. tests and war games seem to be geared towards consolidating Israeli air defences in relaiton to Iranian missile capabilities, prior to a possible and long anticipated showdown with Iran and Syria. By the same token, Israel is also preparing for war with Syria, which has been upgrading and advancing its missile arsenal and technology with the help of both Iran and Russia. Israel’s Nuclear Missile Test: Veiled Nuclear Threat against Iran? Is Iran threatening Israel or is it the other way around? The Israeli government has said that all options at Israel’s disposal are legitimate in crippling Iran. According to Reuters, Israel stated on January 17 that a missile tested by Tel Aviv was “capable of carrying an ‘unconventional payload’ — an apparent reference to the nuclear warheads Israel is assumed to possess, though it has never publicly confirmed their existence.” [5] Israel Radio (which is the object of censorship regarding military issues), claims that according to unidentified foreign sources, Israel was developing its Jericho III long-range surface-to-surface missile and that Jericho III has a range which can reach Iranian territory. [6] Are these statements intended to intimidate Tehran and its regional allies in the Middle East? According to another Reuters report, “Israel is believed to have atomic arms and foreign analysts have said for many years that its Jericho I and Jericho II missiles can carry nuclear warheads.” [7] Without giving its sources the same report also stated, “Amateur photos posted on Israeli news Web sites showed a white plume in the sky above central Israel.” [8] This appears to be a reference to some form of a nuclear weapons test. NOTES [1] The Strategic objectives of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon were the following; .1. Neutralizing the Lebanese Resistance and finlandizing (pacifying) Lebanon, while empowering Lebanese fractions collaborating with the governments of America, France, and Israel to control Lebanon as a proxy state. .2. Engage Syria in a devastating war that would open the door for possible U.S. and NATO involvement and eventually result in controlling the Syrian coast and regime change in Damascus. .3. Militarizing the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean and giving NATO forces valid rational for their naval and troop presence in the region. [2] Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, The March to War: Syria Preparing for US-Israeli Attacks, Centre for Research on Globalization, May 24, 2007; Syria will intervene if Israeli troop approach, Xinhua News Agency, July 24, 2006; “Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal said on Sunday that Syria will not sit tight if Israeli ground troops invade Lebanon and approach his country, the official SANA news agency reported. ‘If Israel invades Lebanon over ground and comes near to us, which threatens the national security (of Syria), Syria will not sit tight,’ Bilal was quoted as saying in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.” [3] Aron Heller, Israel, U.S. Test Missile Defense, The Guardian (U.K.), March 18, 2007. [4] Iran Lunches First Space Rocket, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), February 25, 2007; Iran rocket claim raises tension, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), February 25, 2007. [5] Firouz Sedarat, Israel “would not dare attack Iran”: Ahmadinejad, Reuters, January 17, 2008. [6] Ori Lewis and Daniel Williams, Israel says carried out missile launching test, Reuters, January 17, 2007. [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Israel's policy in Gaza: at least as evil as it is self-defeating

Israel's policy towards the Gaza issue is at least as phenomenally stupid as it is evil. In fact, I consider it a perfect case study in Neocon short-term thinking. Let's take a look at the context, at what has happened, at what is going on now and at where all this leads.

The main, over-arching, issue Israel, as a self-described "Jewish state", is facing today is not terrorism or Iranian nukes but demographics. Israel, as the last openly racist state on the planet, considers it vital to keep a Jewish majority within its borders. This is why a council of rabbis gets to decide who qualifies as "Jew" and who does not, and why the so-called law of return makes any Jew on the planet eligible for relocation to Israel and Israeli citizenship (even if this Jews is non-religious, does not speak Hebrew or Yiddish, and does not care in the least about Israel) while those Arabs who were born in today's Israel and who were expelled from their homes and towns are not allowed to return even though such a right is enshrined in international law. The problem is that a full 20 percent of the Israeli population is not Jewish and that the Palestinian birth rate is much higher (both in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper) than among Jews.

The Israeli elites came up with a two-tiered solution to this issue: first, an Apartheid-like system was set up inside Israel to deprive the non-Jews from most of their civil and political rights; second, Israel withdrew from Gaza and agreed to a "two state solution".

This is what can be called the "Two Walls" policy: the creation of a legal "invisible wall" inside Israel (Apartheid) and the simultaneous creation of a visible wall separating Israel from a series of Palestinian Bantustans under tight Israeli control.

While Israel could unilaterally withdraw from Gaza because it is an isolated and contiguous piece of land in the south of the country, a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank is not an option: there are too many settlements, "Jews-only" roads, natural resources and military positions in the West Bank to allow the Israelis to leave. A system of Bantustans could ONLY be achieved if an Israeli withdrawal was negotiated with some kind of compliant Palestinian authority willing to do Israel's bidding. Enter Fatah.

Over the years Fatah transformed itself from a liberation movement to a collaborationist force, a kind of "Palestinian franchise of the Israeli Shin Bet". The Fatah leadership is amazingly corrupt, even by Middle-Eastern standards, and more than willing to do anything Israel tells is as long as it is allowed to remain in power. As a result, Fatah and Israel now really need each other: Fatah to remain in power, and Israel to put a Palestinian face to its occupation, of course, but even more so to negotiate a two state solution acceptable to Israel.

For all its other faults, of which there are many, Hamas will never agree to the Bantustanization of the West Bank. So the "Two Walls" policy is totally predicated on keeping Fatah in power in the West Bank at any cost. Should the Fatah regime collapse in the West Bank the entire edifice of Israel survival as a racist state would be at risk.

In this context, the policy chosen by Israel in Gaza is baffling by its boundless stupidity: by totally refusing to deal with Hamas and by blockading Gaza and creating a humanitarian disaster Israel has made the open collaboration of Abbas with the "Jewish state" politically impossible. Things are now getting so much out of control that, according to Arab news reports, Abbas is considering resigning.

In contrast, the Hamas policy in Gaza has proven nothing short of brilliant. By overthrowing Fatah and thus freeing Gaza from Israeli control Hamas made it possible for the Palestinians to sustain a campaign of Kassam missile strikes (directed mainly, but not only, against the Israeli town of Sderot). These cheap missiles, which are worse than useless in a military sense, have proven a fantastically powerful political weapon which now threatens to bring down the Abbas-Olmert alliance and, therefore, the entire Israeli plan on how to solve the Palestinian issue.

What an irony indeed, that the most powerful and bloated military and security apparatus in the Middle-East, backed by an imperial superpower, has had its most vital policies totally foiled by homemade rockets which no army in the world would ever want to have, even for free!

How did the "Jewish state" ever get itself in such a situation?! By its boundless arrogance, by its utter contempt for "the Arabs", by its mantrically repeated belief that "the Arabs only understand force" and by its racist delusion that the "dumb Arabs" would never be able to outsmart the presumably brilliant Jewish mind.

Israel is now truly facing an existential threat, at least as the last racist state on the face of the earth: that threat is its own boundless and self-defeating arrogance, further exacerbated by a phenomenally incompetent leadership.

There can be no doubt that Olmert has proven himself to be the single worst Israeli leader ever (the fact that he was ehtusiastically supported by the single worst President in US history did not help, of course). Now that is has become painfully obvious that everything Olmert ever did failed, the situation is becoming extremely dangerous for the entire region.

God willing, Olmert and Dubya will just sit out the rest of their time and we can only hope that the publication of the Winograd report at the end of the month will result in Olmert's resignation, although none of the Israeli political leaders likely to succeed him look too promising either (and some look outright deranged, like Avigdor Lieberman).

Alas, a change in leadership and political course in Israel is not something very likely. I consider it much more likely that Israel will re-occupy Gaza. It will be packaged with the usual rhetoric about "self-defense", "anti-terrorism", "restoration of law and order" and "reinstatement of the only democratic and legitimate political Palestinian authority" (Fatah). It is likely to be a bloody, but short operation, supported by Fatah goons who will enter Gaza right behind the IDF and whose return to power will herald a new reign of terror against the resistance to Israel.

Needless to say, that would be as bloody as it would be useless as it would kill any prospects for a "two state" solution negotiated with the Fatah regime in Ramallah which, being even more hated than today, will become as dependent on Israeli forces to protect it as any Jewish settlement.

Olmert is too weak to seriously negotiate, and Dubya is too stupid to put pressure on him (most definitely not in an election year anyway). Hamas will not back down from its highly successful strategy, and Fatah cannot sustain an overt collaboration with Israel in these circumstances. Time is running out, the situation in Gaza is beyond catastrophic and political pressure is mounting on Israel to stop treating Gaza like the biggest open air concentration camp in the world. This is why Hassan Nasrallah is quite correct when he warns that "Gaza has entered a danger circle" and that the Palestinians there "should take extreme caution": an invasion of Gaza is probably imminent.