[R-G] Superb analysis by Uri Avnery

[Anthony Fenton]

Avnery will be debating Daniel Pipes on Al Jazeera soon:


Riz on Israeli action
Sent at 13/01 09:58:16 by Al Jazeera(English)
Riz speaks to Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery and Israel supporter  
Daniel Pipes. Watch and chat live at 20:30 GMT.
http://www.livestation.com/


On 12-Jan-09, at 1:03 PM, Sid Shniad wrote:

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> Uri Avnery
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> 10.1.09
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> How Many Divisions?
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> NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous  
> crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a  
> thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the  
> millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation  
> from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The  
> Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and  
> to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of  
> thousands.
>
>
>
> Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The  
> Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the  
> millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled  
> to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins.  
> They called it the Blitz.
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>
>
> This is the description that would now appear in the history books –  
> if the Germans had won the war.
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> Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are  
> being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants  
> of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human  
> shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive  
> bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women,  
> children and unarmed men are killed and injured.
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> IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role.  
> The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with  
> its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and  
> the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand,  
> perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between  
> them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost  
> infinite.
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>
>
> Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli  
> propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side  
> of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli  
> peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must  
> defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted  
> as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams  
> are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half  
> million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.
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>
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> Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western  
> TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.
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> True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of  
> the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera’s  
> Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its  
> terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly  
> constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is  
> what is decisive, in the end.
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>
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> War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or  
> psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for  
> one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being  
> branded a traitor.
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> The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the  
> propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is  
> the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational  
> decisions.
>
>
>
> An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of  
> this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya  
> refugee camp.
>
>
>
> Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world,  
> the army “revealed” that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from  
> near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo  
> which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short  
> time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more  
> than a year old. In brief: a falsification.
>
>
>
> Later the official liar claimed that “our   soldiers were shot at  
> from inside the school”. Barely a day passed before the army had to  
> admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from  
> inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which  
> was full of terrified refugees.
>
>
>
> But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time,  
> the Israeli public was completely convinced that “they shot from  
> inside the school”, and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.
>
>
>
> So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in  
> the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque  
> instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms  
> cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government  
> building a “symbol of Hamas rule”. Thus the Israeli army retained  
> its purity as the “most moral army in the world”.
>
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> THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war  
> plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak – a man whose way  
> of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral  
> insanity”, a sociopathic disorder.
>
>
>
> The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is  
> to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination  
> of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a  
> foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.
>
>
>
> The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently  
> democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East  
> Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had  
> come to the conclusion that Fatah’s peaceful approach had gained  
> precisely nothing from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements,  
> nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward  
> ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is  
> deeply rooted in the population – not only as a resistance movement  
> fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in  
> the past – but also as a political and religious body that provides  
> social, educational and medical services.
>
>
>
> From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not  
> a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the  
> other Palestinian regions. They do not “hide behind the population”,  
> the population views them as their only defenders.
>
>
>
> Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions.  
> Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise  
> up against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and  
> reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of  
> Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the  
> Londoners rose up against Churchill.
>
>
>
> He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely  
> populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of  
> civilians. Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that  
> “they will change their ways” and “it will sear their  
> consciousness”, so that in future they will not dare to resist Israel.
>
>
>
> A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties  
> among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro- 
> war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That  
> is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.
>
>
>
> This consideration played an especially important role because the  
> entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who  
> gained in the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his  
> ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV  
> screens.
>
>
>
> Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our  
> soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The  
> planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one  
> Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of  
> casualties on our side is the overriding commandment, which is  
> causing record numbers of civilian casualties on the other side.
>
>
>
> That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of  
> warfare – and that has been its Achilles heel.
>
>
>
> A person without imagination, like Barak (his election slogan: “Not  
> a Nice Guy, but a Leader”) cannot imagine how decent people around  
> the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended  
> families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their  
> inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white shrouds ready for  
> burial, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because  
> ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and  
> medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers  
> bringing in food. The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the  
> dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space,  
> have shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an image  
> of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, twisting with pain and  
> crying out: “Mama! Mama!”
>
>
>
> The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing  
> these images by forcibly preventing press coverage. The Israeli  
> journalists, to their shame, agreed to be satisfied with the reports  
> and photos provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were authentic  
> news, while they themselves remained miles away from the events.  
> Foreign journalists were not allowed in either, until they protested  
> and were taken for quick tours in selected and supervised groups.  
> But in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view cannot  
> completely exclude all others – the cameras are inside the strip, in  
> the middle of the hell, and cannot be controlled. Aljazeera  
> broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home.
>
>
>
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> THE BATTLE for the TV screen is one of the decisive battles of the  
> war.
>
>
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> Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a  
> billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are  
> horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers  
> see the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority as  
> collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against  
> their Palestinian brothers.
>
>
>
> The security services of the Arab regimes are registering a  
> dangerous ferment among the peoples. Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed  
> Arab leader because of his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face  
> of terrified refugees, started to pressure the decision-makers in  
> Washington, who until that time had blocked all calls for a cease- 
> fire. These began to understand the menace to vital American  
> interests in the Arab world and suddenly changed their attitude –  
> causing consternation among the complacent Israeli diplomats.
>
>
>
> People with moral insanity cannot really understand the motives of  
> normal people and must guess their reactions. “How many divisions  
> has the Pope?” Stalin sneered. “How many divisions have people of  
> conscience?” Ehud Barak may well be asking.
>
>
>
> As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not very quick to  
> react. Not very strong and organized. But at a certain moment, when  
> the atrocities overflow and masses of protesters come together, that  
> can decide a war.
>
>
>
>
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> THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to  
> grasp the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the  
> war, Hamas cannot lose it.
>
>
>
> Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas  
> fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas  
> fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the  
> heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every  
> youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands  
> of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt,  
> the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse.
>
>
>
> If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but  
> unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it  
> will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.
>
>
>
> What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the  
> image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to  
> commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.  
> This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our  
> standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.
>
>
>
> In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime  
> against the State of Israel.
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