Eyeless in Gaza
Willful Blindness at the Top in Israel and the USA
In the Jewish legend, the great warrior Samson ends up, as John Milton famously puts it, ´eyeless in Gaza´ He is blinded by the Philistines and harnessed to a huge millstone, forced to drag himself around and around in circles, always moving but unable to go anywhere. Eventually, in the most spectacular of suicides, he gets his revenge by pulling down their temple on top of the Philistines, killing both them and himself. The story is apparently supposed to be heroic, but it feels more like a fable of vicious futility. Cruelty begets cruelty until there is nothing left but mutual destruction. - Fintan O´Toole in the New York Review of Books, October 10.
In Washington, DC, Jewish Voice for Peace has led large protests against Israel´s genocidal assault on Gaza. Polls show that a significant majority of U.S. voters support a ceasefire. Yet on October 19, the United States vetoed a resolution calling for a ceasefire. President Biden has reaffirmed full support for Israel, while counselling a tactical delay in a ground assault to allow for further bombing. Yet there is rising dissent among U.S. policymakers, as indicated by the public resignation of the State Department official managing U.S. aid to Israel.
This AfricaFocus notes contains links to and brief excerpts from a number of current sources, as well as a brief excerpt from a pamphlet published in 1971 on South Africa and Israel of which I was a principal co-author.
The recent article that I found most helpful in providing in-depth background almost never mentioned in current news is by journalist and Middle East analyst Helena Cobban, who first interviewed Hamas leaders in 1989 and is widely recognized for her extensive publications on the Middle East. Please see below an extensive excerpt from her article, as well as shorter excerpts from other sources.
Voters Agree the U.S. Should Call for a Ceasefire and De-Escalation of Violence in Gaza to Prevent Civilian Deaths, Data for Progress, October 20, 2023
A Jewish Plea: Stand Up to Israel's Act of Genocide, by Stephanie Fox, October 13, 2023
The Only Way Forward - Boston Review, by Helena Cobban, October 17, 2023
Going All-In for Israel May Make Biden Complicit in Genocide, October 19, 2023
More than 400 Capitol Hill Staffers Call for Cease Fire in Gaza, October 19, 2023
South Africa and Israel, Madison Area Committee on Southern Africa,October 1971
Hamas’s leaders might be persuaded to join a negotiation for a robust two-state outcome
Helena Cobban, Boston Review, October 16
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-only-way-forward/
Among most Western media today, the idea that Hamas may have political goals seems quite absent. Over the decades since its founding in late 1987, Hamas has nearly always been portrayed as intrinsically violent and deeply anti-Semitic. They are held to be unalterably opposed to the existence of Israel. And they are described as having a vice-like hold on a captive Gazan people, reigning over them through fear and intimidation. It is not too hard to understand why this is: most of these portrayals are written by people who have never met, interviewed, or interacted with Hamas leaders.
But I have. I first interviewed some Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank back in 1989 during the height of the First Intifada. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s I conducted interviews with them as parts of reporting and research projects I undertook for this magazine, The Nation, and other outlets. And from 2004 through 2011 I interviewed Hamas leaders several times, both inside the occupied Palestinian areas and in Damascus, where the organization’s leadership was headquartered until around 2012 when the support it gave to Syria’s opposition led the government to expel them.
Here is my current assessment of their capabilities and positions.
First, Hamas as an organization is much broader and more deeply rooted in Palestinian society than most Western portrayals of it would admit. It has broad, longstanding alliances throughout Gaza (obviously) and the West Bank, as well as with the sizable Palestinian communities in Jordan and the Arab Gulf countries. It has started to rebuild its once-robust grassroots organizations in the large Palestinian communities in Syria and Lebanon. And it has significant ties with the governments of Iran, Qatar, and Turkey and intermittent ties with other regional governments, like those of Jordan or Egypt.
Second, Hamas leaders have always kept a strong focus on the issue of Jerusalem. For example, their name for the October 7 operation, “Al-Aqsa Flood,” refers to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem that has for years been the site of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces. This focus has allowed the group to starkly distinguish itself from the PLO, which effectively surrendered the Palestinians’ historic claim to the holy city after its leadership, as part of the Oslo Accords, agreed to establish the capital of the new Palestinian Authority in nearby Ramallah, not in Jerusalem. Hamas knows that Jerusalem is a cause that speaks powerfully both to the yearnings of Palestinians everywhere and to the sensitivities of the Arab and Islamic worlds—and is a thousand times more compelling than anything connected with Ramallah.
And last, Hamas has proven remarkably resilient, weathering Israel’s assassinations of dozens of its prominent leaders since the 1990s. Hamas leadership has long-engrained traditions of using a collaborative, broadly consultative approach to decision making. Hence, even if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should succeed on paper in realizing his stated aim of “wiping out” Hamas in Gaza by taking out its leaders there, the organization would still survive in the robust networks of leaders and supporters it has built up in the West Bank and among Palestinian communities in Jordan, the Gulf countries, Lebanon, and just about everywhere else in the world where large numbers of Palestinians are found. These communities have already been deeply mobilized by the first few days of Israel’s post-October 7 assault on Gaza.
So in one form or another, Hamas is here to stay. And yes, it is undoubtedly politically hardline. It has never completely disavowed the founding charter that called for Palestinian rule in the whole area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean—just as Israel’s ruling Likud party has never disavowed its claims that all of that same area is part of the “Land of Israel,” working to expand Jewish control over the occupied West Bank.
...
When elections were held in January 2006, Hamas won them handily, taking 74 of the council’s 132 seats. The victory stunned the traditional Fatah leaders of the PA and their backers in Washington and Tel Aviv. In a reporting trip to the region soon thereafter, I found that Hamas’s success reflected a combination of skills: a history of having provided helpful community services to different grassroots constituencies; a reputation for generally “clean hands” (unlike Fatah); effective organizing through women’s networks, with several Hamas women leaders getting elected to the parliament; and good electoral discipline, not running more candidates than there were seats in multi-seat constituencies, as Fatah and its allies did in several places.
The elections gave the PLO and its U.S. and Israeli allies a great opportunity to work to find a way to draw Hamas into the political process. Hamas was willing, too, initially making inroads to form a “government of national unity” with Fatah. But the reaction from Israel and Washington was harsh. They threatened to kill any of the newly elected legislators who would agree to join such a government—which I know because I was the conduit for conveying one such threat.
Later, Washington and Israel persuaded Fatah to start plotting to overthrow the newly elected leaders of the PA’s parliament and premiership. In 2007 Fatah tried to launch a violent coup against Hamas, but Hamas leaders in Gaza rebuffed the attempt. Afterward Hamas set about institutionalizing their position in Gaza while Fatah retreated, with their generous U.S. funding, to Ramallah in the West Bank. All the while, Hamas and its allies retained significant support in the West Bank and throughout the widespread Palestinian diaspora—and remained the democratically elected government in Gaza, although new elections have not been held since.
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Josh Paul on Why He Resigned From the State Department Over Arms to Israel
A senior State Department official who worked in the bureau overseeing arms transfers resigned on Wednesday over the Biden administration’s decision to continue sending weapons and ammunition to Israel. His departure is a rare sign of internal dissent over the administration’s strong support for Israel as it continues airstrikes in Gaza following Hamas’s deadly attacks on Oct. 7. The official, Josh Paul, was the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which handles arms transfers.
In an open letter posted to LinkedIn, Paul wrote that the U.S.’s decision to rush “more arms to one side of the conflict” is “shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.” October 19 - https://time.com/6325957/josh-paul-state-department-israel-arms/
Emergency Legal Briefing Paper
Center for Constitutional Rights, October 19, 2023
"Like both Palestine and Israel, the United States is a signatory to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and considered the building block of the international human rights system. The Genocide Convention places a duty on all 153 signatories to both prevent and punish genocide. The Convention criminalizes not just the commission of genocide, but incitement and attempts to commit genocide, as well as complicity in genocide, which is discussed below in detail. Israel, the United States, and indeed, all States, must immediately comply with their obligations under the Convention.
The United States has been obligated, from the time learning of the serious risk of genocide of the Palestinian people, to exercise its influence on Israel to prevent the crime. The United States is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza, rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.
The United States – and U.S. citizens, including and up to the President – can be held responsible for their role in furthering genocide. Any individual who commits, incites, conspires to commit or is complicit in genocide can be held liable under international law – including before the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), which already has an open investigation into crimes being committed in Palestine."
South Africa and Israel
Madison Area Committee on Southern Africa, October 1971
https://projects.kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/210-808-3612/MACSASAIsrael10-71opt.pdf
One historical dynamic common to both South Africa and Israel is that which derives from their origins as settler states. Specific circumstances of the settlement process differed in the two cases. ... Dutch settlement in South Africa occurred early in the period of outward European expansion and the original settlers themselves subsequently experienced a degree of colonial subjugation by the British.
Settlement of European Jews in Israel occurred relatively late and was not so much a manifestation of European economic expansion as the response to the persecution and attempts at genocide which the Jews suffered in Eastern and Western Europe. For its own reasons, the British Empire acquiesced in the Zionist settlement.
Yet, in spite of such specific differences, the fact of the common origin of South Africa and Israel as settler states appears to be one which is useful in helping to explain the formation in each case of somewhat similar internal and external policies. In each case the government has developed policies to deal with indigenous peoples within and with independent Afro-Asian states outside their borders in the interest of survival of a regime which represents immigrants and their descendants.
Both states. which were established with the aid of British imperialism (but also in conflict with it when settler and imperial interests failed to coincide) are now maintained with the aid of western imperialism of which the new center - the United States of America - itself has origins as a settler state.
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I don’t approve of violence But Palestine for the Palestinos , definitely yes !! Not sure Netanyahu didn’t let that happen so that he would have an excuse to invade