Sent: Monday, July 13, 2009 10:22 AM
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1098053.html
Our IDF
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz: 06/07/2009
Combat is the best, my brother, as the famous bumper sticker reads. It's a
good thing we have Shayetet 13. Operating at the crack of dawn - or was it
before nightfall? - the daring naval commandos fearlessly took control of a
rusty, rickety, unarmed boat bobbing in the middle of the sea. That's
exactly why we have a naval commando force - to take control of ships
offering humanitarian aid. Behold, the guardian of Israel neither slumbers
nor sleeps. The military correspondents reported on the incident with an
amazement that only they can muster. But even they could not provide a fig
leaf for the operation: The Israel Defense Forces has once again used its
power to overcome the weak; the navy has once again acted like pirates. The
Arion was abducted in the framework of protecting Israel's security for all
eternity, blah, blah, blah.
Soldiers, journalists and news consumers automatically refrain from asking
questions. The navy captured another ship carrying symbolic aid, as if its
passengers were Somali pirates. These were people of conscience from various
countries carrying toys and medicine.
This was not the navy's first daring operation of this kind, nor will it be
the last. When there are no hostile aid ships on the horizon, the navy takes
control of wretched Gazan boats, using water hoses or firing at its
passengers - poor fishermen who only want to make a living at sea. This is
the main activity unfolding off Gaza's shores. A navy outfitted with the
best arsenal in the world is hunting surfboards. One of the best-armed
forces in the world is chasing children, examining old people's documents
and entering bedrooms to make arrests.
We ought to pay close attention to what preoccupies our military. While
defense officials hold discussions on buying the F-35 combat jet at $200
million per plane, the IDF is mostly busy with miserable, pointless police
work that befits an occupation army. It is engaged in ludicrous and useless
policing in a "war" against people equipped with some of the most primitive
weapons in the world.
In the dead of night, soldiers in elite and not-so-elite units break into
the homes of Palestinians, some of whom are guilty of no crime, and
needlessly awaken and frighten women and children. Their comrades spend
their service standing at checkpoints, occasionally shooting and killing
needlessly. Other soldiers chase after children throwing stones or Molotov
cocktails and shoot at them. "A huge terrorist attack" that was thwarted
near the security fence in Gaza a month ago was to be carried out by "a
force" that numbered eight Palestinians, some of them mounted on mules. The
mule-rider's brigade - these are the forces against us.
We saw it, of course, during Operation Cast Lead, the war that provoked
almost no opposition. As reported last week by the U.S.-based Human Rights
Watch, our drones bombed helpless Gaza residents, killing a few dozen,
including children. Our jets and helicopters, among the most sophisticated
in the world, are bombing residential neighborhoods. They may be preparing
for an operation that fires the imagination in Iran, but meanwhile they are
circling the Gaza sky as if it belonged to them.
If that were not enough, we now have the most advanced system of all: female
soldiers who are lookouts trained to shoot live fire after completing
"precedent-setting training." The army newspaper Bamahane reported it with
great enthusiasm: "This is the first time female soldiers will shoot
automatic gunfire from within a W.R., noted the C.O. of the T.B," whatever
those initials mean. In simpler language, it means that 19-year-old girls
are playing with joysticks in an air-conditioned room and "taking down"
people.
This then is the great progress of the "people's army" to train women to
kill, while their comrades, soldiers and Border Police, are routinely sent
to shoot live fire at unarmed demonstrators at Bil'in and Na'alin. This, for
the most part, is the IDF's balance sheet. This is what largely preoccupies
the best, most moral army in the world. Pilots who have never fought in an
air battle and soldiers with no army against them now spend most of their
time maintaining the occupation in a kind of pathetic combat, and they are
our protective shield. When the day of reckoning comes, we will remember
this.
***
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10636.shtml
Destroying Gaza
By Sara Roy,
The Electronic Intifada, 9 July 2009
Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern
Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and
the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. This article was originally published by
The Harvard Crimson and is republished with the author's permission.
The recent meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu generated speculation over the future
relationship between America and Israel, and a potentially changed US policy
towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysts on the right and left are
commenting on a new, tougher American policy characterized by strengthened
US demands on Israel. However, beneath the diplomatic choreography lies an
agonizing reality that received only brief comment from Obama and silence
from Netanyahu: the ongoing devastation of the people of Gaza.
Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a
state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into
one of aid-dependent paupers. This context is undeniably one of mass
suffering, created largely by Israel but with the active complicity of the
international community, especially the US and European Union, and the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Gaza's subjection began long before Israel's recent war against it. The
Israeli occupation -- now largely forgotten or denied by the international
community -- has devastated Gaza's economy and people, especially since
2006. Although economic restrictions actually increased before Hamas'
electoral victory in January 2006, the deepened sanction regime and siege
subsequently imposed by Israel and the international community, and later
intensified in June 2007 when Hamas seized control of Gaza, has all but
destroyed the local economy. If there has been a pronounced theme among the
many Palestinians, Israelis and internationals who I have interviewed in the
last three years, it was the fear of damage to Gaza's society and economy so
profound that billions of dollars and generations of people would be
required to address it -- a fear that has now been realized.
After Israel's December assault, Gaza's already compromised conditions have
become virtually unlivable. Livelihoods, homes and public infrastructure
have been damaged or destroyed on a scale that even the Israeli army
admitted was indefensible. In Gaza today, there is no private sector to
speak of and no industry. Eighty percent of Gaza's agricultural crops were
destroyed and Israel continues to snipe at farmers attempting to plant and
tend fields near the well-fenced and patrolled border. Most productive
activity has been extinguished.
One powerful expression of Gaza's economic demise -- and the Gazans'
indomitable will to provide for themselves and their families -- is its
burgeoning tunnel economy that emerged long ago in response to the siege.
Thousands of Palestinians are now employed digging tunnels into Egypt --
around 1,000 tunnels are reported to exist although not all are operational.
According to local economists, 90 percent of economic activity in Gaza --
once considered a lower middle-income economy (along with the West Bank) --
is presently devoted to smuggling.
Today, 96 percent of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on
humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Program, the
Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet
the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a 22 March
decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs
entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry
during the week of 10 May, for example, at best meeting 23 percent of
required need.
Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to
4,000 approved products prior to June 2006. According to the Israeli
journalist Amira Hass, Gazans still are denied many commodities (a policy in
effect long before the December assault): building materials (including wood
for windows and doors), electrical appliances (such as refrigerators and
washing machines), spare parts for cars and machines, fabrics, threads,
needles, candles, matches, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery,
cups, glasses, musical instruments, books, tea, coffee, sausages, semolina,
chocolate, sesame seeds, nuts, milk products in large packages, most baking
products, light bulbs, crayons, clothing and shoes.
Given these constraints, among many others -- including the internal
disarray of the Palestinian leadership -- one wonders how the reconstruction
to which Obama referred will be possible. There is no question that people
must be helped immediately. Programs aimed at alleviating suffering and
reinstating some semblance of normalcy are ongoing, but at a scale shaped
entirely by the extreme limitations on the availability of goods. In this
context of repressive occupation and heightened restriction, what does it
mean to reconstruct Gaza? How is it possible under such conditions to
empower people and build sustainable and resilient institutions able to
withstand expected external shocks? Without an immediate end to Israel's
blockade and the resumption of trade and the movement of people outside the
prison that Gaza has long been, the current crisis will grow massively more
acute. Unless the US administration is willing to exert real pressure on
Israel for implementation -- and the indications thus far suggest they are
not -- little will change. Not surprisingly, despite international pledges
of $5.2 billion for Gaza's reconstruction, Palestinians there are now
rebuilding their homes using mud.
Recently, I spoke with some friends in Gaza and the conversations were
profoundly disturbing. My friends spoke of the deeply-felt absence of any
source of protection -- personal, communal or institutional. There is little
in society that possesses legitimacy and there is a fading consensus on
rules and an eroding understanding of what they are for. Trauma and grief
overwhelm the landscape despite expressions of resilience. The feeling of
abandonment among people appears complete, understood perhaps in their
growing inability to identify with any sense of possibility. The most
striking was this comment: "It is no longer the occupation or even the war
that consumes us but the realization of our own irrelevance."
What possible benefit can be derived from an increasingly impoverished,
unhealthy, densely crowded and furious Gaza alongside Israel? Gaza's
terrible injustice not only threatens Israeli and regional security, but it
undermines America's credibility, alienating our claim to democratic
practice and the rule of law.
If Palestinians are continually denied what we want and demand for
ourselves -- an ordinary life, dignity, livelihood, safety and a place where
they can raise their children -- and are forced, yet again, to face the
destruction of their families, then the inevitable outcome will be greater
and more extreme violence across all factions, both old and increasingly
new. What looms is no less than the loss of entire generation of
Palestinians. And if this happens -- perhaps it already has -- we shall all
bear the cost.
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