Son of Death
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- Written by Uri Avnery Uri Avnery
- Published: 22 August 2014 22 August 2014
- Hits: 4953 4953
THE WAR was over. Families returned to their kibbutzim near Gaza. Kindergartens opened up again. A ceasefire was in force and extended again and again. Obviously, both sides were exhausted.
And then, suddenly, the war came back.
What happened? Well, Hamas launched rockets against Beersheba in the middle of the ceasefire.
Why? No why. You know how the terrorists are. Bloodthirsty. They can't help it. Just like scorpions.
But it is not so simple.
THE CAIRO talks were near success, or so it seemed. But Binyamin Netanyahu was in trouble. He hid the Egyptian draft agreement for a long ceasefire even from his cabinet colleagues. They learned about it only from the media, which disclosed it from Palestinian sources.
Apparently, the draft said that the blockade would be greatly relaxed, if not officially ended. Talks about the building of a port and airport were to start within a month.
What? What did Israel get out of this? After all the shooting and killing, with 64 Israeli soldiers dead, after all the grandiose speeches about our resounding victory, was that all? No wonder Netanyahu tried to hide the document.
The Israeli delegation was called home without signing. The exasperated Egyptian mediators got another 24 hour extension of the ceasefire. It was to expire at midnight on Tuesday, but everybody on both sides expected it to be extended again and again. And then it happened.
At about 16.00 hours, three rockets were fired at Beersheba and fell into open spaces. No warning sirens. Curiously enough, Hamas denied having launched them, and no other Palestinian organization took responsibility. This was strange. After every previous launching from Gaza, some Palestinian organization has always proudly claimed credit.
As usual, Israeli airplanes promptly started to retaliate and bombed buildings in the Gaza Strip. As usual, rockets rained down on Israel. (I heard the interceptions in Tel Aviv).
BUSINESS AS usual? Not quite.
First it became known that an hour before the rockets came in, the Israeli population near Gaza was warned by the army to prepare their shelters and "safe spaces".
Then it appeared that the first Gaza building hit belonged to the family of a Hamas military commander. Three people were killed, among them a baby and his mother.
And then the news spread: It was the family of Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. (Qassam was a Palestinian hero, the first rebel against British rule in Palestine in the 1930s. He was hunted down and killed by the British.) Among those killed this Tuesday were Deif's wife and baby son. But it seems that Deif himself was not there.
That in itself is no wonder. Deif has survived at least four attempts to assassinate him. He has lost an eye and several limbs, but always came out alive.
All around him, his successive commanders, political and military peers and subordinates, dozens of them, have been assassinated throughout the years. But he has led a charmed life.
Now he heads the Israeli hit list, the most wanted and hunted Palestinian activist. He is the No. 1 "Son of Death", a rather biblical appellation used in Israel for those marked for assassination.
Like most inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, Deif is a child of refugees from Israel. His family comes from the village Kawkaba, now in Israel, not far from Gaza. I passed through it in the 1948 war, before it was razed to the ground.
For the Israeli Security Service, he is a prize for which it is well worth breaking the ceasefire and reigniting the war.
FOR MANY security agencies around the world, including the American and the Russian, assassination is a sport and an art.
Israel claims to hold the gold medal.
An assassination is a complicated operation. It requires a lot of time, expertise, patience and luck. The operators have to recruit informers near the victim, install electronic devices, obtain precise information about his every movement, execute their design within minutes once the opportunity presents itself.
Because of this, there is no time for confirmation from above. Perhaps the Security Service (usually called Shin Bet) got permission from Netanyahu, its sole political chief, perhaps not.
They obviously were informed that Deif was visiting his family. That was a golden opportunity. For months, indeed for years, Deif has been living underground, in the literal sense – somewhere in the maze of tunnels his men had dug beneath the Strip. He was never sighted.
Since the beginning of this war, all the other prominent Hamas leaders have also been living under the ground. From Ismail Haniyeh down, not one of them has been seen. The unlimited command of the air by Israeli planes and drones makes this advisable. Hamas has no anti-air weapons.
It seems to me highly unlikely that Deif would risk his life by visiting his family. But Shin Bet obviously got a lead and believed it. The three strange rockets fired on Beersheba provided the pretext for breaking the ceasefire, and so the war started again.
Real aficionados of the art of assassination are not very interested in the political or military consequences of their actions. “Art for art's sake”.
A propos, the last Gaza war, two years ago, started the same way. The Israeli army assassinated the de-facto al-Qassam leader, Ahmed Jaabari. The ensuing war with its many hundreds of dead was just collateral damage.
Jaabari was at the time filling in for Deif, who was convalescing in Cairo.
ALL THIS is, of course, much too complicated for American and European diplomats. They like simple stories.
The White House immediately reacted to the resumption of hostilities by condemning the Hamas launching of rockets and reaffirming that "Israel has a right to defend itself". The Western media parroted this line.
For Netanyahu, whether he knew in advance of the assassination attempt or not, it was a way out of a dilemma. He was in the unfortunate position of many leaders in history who start a war and do not know how to get out of it.
In a war, a leader makes grandiloquent speeches, promises victory and bountiful achievements. These promises seldom come true. (If they do, like in Versailles 1919, that may be even worse.)
Netanyahu is a gifted marketing man, if nothing else. He promised a lot, and the people believed him and gave him a 77% rating. The Egyptian draft proposal for a permanent ceasefire, though markedly pro-Israel, fell far short of a victory for Israel. It only confirmed that the war ended in a draw. Netanyahu's own cabinet was rebellious, public opinion was souring perceptibly. The resumption of the war got him out of this hole.
But what now?
BOMBING THE Gaza population draws more and more criticism from world public opinion. It also has lost its appeal in Israel. The maxim "Let's bomb them until they stop hating us" obviously does not work.
The alternative is to enter the Gaza Strip and occupy it completely, so that even Deif and his men have to come up to the surface to be assassinated. But that is a dangerous proposition.
When I was a soldier in the 1948 war, we were taught never to get into a situation which leaves the enemy no way out. In such a case, he will fight to the end, causing many casualties.
There is no way out of the Gaza Strip. If the Israeli army is sent to conquer the entire Strip, the fighting will be ferocious, causing hundreds of Israeli and thousands of Palestinian dead and injured, and untold destruction. The Prime Minister will be one of the political victims.
Netanyahu is fully aware of that. He doesn't want it. But what else can he do? One can almost pity the man.
He can of course, order the army to occupy only parts of the Strip, a village here, a town there. But that will also spread death and destruction, to no manifest gain. In the end, public discontent will be the same.
Hamas threatened this week to open "the gates of hell" for us. This hardly affects the inhabitants of Tel Aviv, but for the villages and towns near Gaza this is really hell. Casualties are few, but fear is devastating. Families with children leave en masse. When calm returns, they try to go home, but then the next rockets drive them away again.
Their plight evokes a very strong emotional response throughout the country. No politician can ignore it. Least of all the Prime Minister. He needs to end the war. He also needs a clear image of victory. But how to achieve this?
The Egyptian dictator tries to help. So does Barack Obama, though he is furious with Netanyahu and hates his guts. So does Mahmoud Abbas, who is afraid of a Hamas victory.
But as of now, the man who has the final decision is the Son of Death, Mohammed Deif, if he is alive and kicking. If not, his successor.
If he is alive, the assassination of his wife and baby son may not have made him gentler and more peaceable.
The Peace Bus from Jerusalem to the Gaza Border - 5th Journey!
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- Written by Bus of Peace project Bus of Peace project
- Published: 22 August 2014 22 August 2014
- Hits: 4750 4750
Today, Friday, Aug. 22, the Peace Bus from Jerusalem to the Gaza Border will set out on its 5th Journey. Now more than ever important after the negotiations in Cairo failed and the fire broke out. As long as people are dying, we have the moral obligation to work for peace with all our strength.
ATTENTION: decoration of the Peace Bus starts this time at 7:30 and the bus leaves Gan Hapoamon at 8:30!
NEVER AGAIN WAR - LET'S GIVE PEACE A CHANCE and WE WILL NOT STOP UNTIL WE TALK. Spreading the seeds of peace between people and calling upon the authorities on both sides to cease hostilities and come together for sincere peace talks, we continues our mission.
We continue collecting donations for humanitarian aid to people of Gaza from people of Israel. Collecting medicine, hygienic products and food for civilians in Gaza, we hope to ease – if only by a small bit - the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and encourage the public to undertake direct humanitarian relief actions. All donations collected will be delivered with our partner, international health relief organization CARITAS to Gaza. We ask you to donate to help us on our mission, if you can not give us your donation inn person. All the money will use to buy the donations and bring them to Caritas:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-bus-peace-4rd-jorney/x/8356905 (This is a crowdfinding website connected to our donation account)
We received around 8000 NIS already, of which we spent by now 7600 NIS on supplies for Gaza.
Each person donating for Gaza will get flowers from the Peace Bus. Our collections are supported by the organizations "Women for Women" and "Women say Enough", who is engaged in the peace movement and organized collections across the country.
PROGRAM OF THE JOURNEY
We will meet once again on Friday, 21.8, at 7.30 am in the Liberty Bell Garden (Gan Hapoamon), Jerusalem, to decorate our Peace Bus with flowers and art craft.
At 8.30 am our journey starts with support of the family of the Jerusalem Peace maker Haj Ibrahim Abu-Hawa from the Mt. of Olives, whose son will be driving us this Friday.
At 09.30 am we are invited to join the meeting of the SULHA Project, which promotes the peace between Abrahamic religions (http://www.sulha.com/), in the Jewish-Arabic village Newe Shalom, the village of the future in the Middle East (http://wasns.org/)
At 12.00 Noon we will have a ceremony at the Kikar Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. We will express our demands to stop the war and start the negotiations for a long-term peace solution, under the presence of the media, which we will inform in advance, lighting candles and lying down flowers, rehan (basilicum), olive branches and henna powder on symbolical self-created memorial place on the Rabin square to commemorate all human being on both sides, who died as victims of the long-lasting, devastating conflict, shocked by the war and with hope to establish the future of peace together. We invited Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations to take part in this event, which is meant to be a starter- event for a larger protest event on Friday, 29.08, initiated by the Peace Bus. ONLY UNITY FOR PEACE CAN PREVENT THE FUTURE BLOODSHED.
Between 1pm and 3 pm we will be collecting donations from people of Israel to people of Gaza in the Gush Dan area.
At 4 pm we will have a meeting with families from the South Israel, who live near the Gaza border. The meeting will take place in Sderot, while many families from the neighboring communities will join the meeting. The purpose of this visit is to understand what exactly it means to live in the war- torn zone and why these families do not want another war.
Afterwards we will lay down flowers near the Gaza border, to commemorate all those who perished in the conflict on both sides.
At the end of the journey, in Jerusalem, we are invited by the initiator of "Beads for Peace" Maya Bloom in her house for a comfortable beading, cup of tea and a relaxing evening.
(About: http://njjewishnews.com/article/1461/bead-by-bead-crafters-support-a-mideast-peace)
Since we want every penny donated for the humanitarian relief in Gaza to go for that specific purpose, we ask every participant to pay 100NIS contribution for the expenses of this journey (bus and decorations only). Please let me know in advance about your participation, in order to reserve a seat! Thank you!
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
last minute: 05865667676
Here you can make your donations! Thank you very much! Mark as a purpose "medicine for Gaza", "Peace Bus" or "Medicine for Gaza and Peace Bus".
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-bus-peace-4rd-jorney/x/8356905 (This is a crowdfinding website connected to our donation account)
The mission of the Peace Bus is to proclaim non-violence and connect the Peace movement for the long-lasting peace. The Peace movement was not ready during this war to seriously challenge the fierce pro-war attitude on both sides. There might be a next time, so we need to be ready...
Visit our Event on the facebook:
אוטובוס השלום ממשיך בדרך! The bus of Peace بَاص السَلام
https://www.facebook.com/events/678843702197246/
Gaza counts cost of war as more than 360 factories destroyed or damaged
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- Written by Harriet Sherwood in Gaza Harriet Sherwood in Gaza
- Published: 22 August 2014 22 August 2014
- Hits: 5428 5428
Thousands of acres of farmland and cattle also wiped out with damage estimated at three times that of 2008-9 conflict
[Photo]
Mohammed Al Tebani inside his factory in Gaza, which made ice cream among other sweets, and was destroyed by targeted shelling. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Gaza's economy will take years to recover from the devastating impact of the war, in which more than 360 factories have been destroyed or badly damaged and thousands of acres of farmland ruined by tanks, shelling and air strikes, according to analysts.
Israeli air strikes on Gaza have resumed since a temporary ceasefire brokedown on Tuesday after rockets were fired from Gaza. The Israeli Defence Force said it launched air strikes on 20 sites on Friday morning and Gaza health officials said two Palestinians were killed in an attack on a farm.
Almost 10% of Gaza's factories have been put out of action, said the Palestinian Federation of Industries. Most other industrial plants have halted production during the conflict, causing losses estimated at more than $70m (£42m), said the union of Palestinian industries. The UN's food and agriculture organisation (FAO) said about 42,000 acres of croplands had sustained substantial direct damage and half of Gaza's poultry stock has been lost due to direct hits or lack of care as access to farmlands along the border with Israel became impossible.
More than 9% of the annual fishing catch was lost between 9 July and 10 August, it added.
"The initial indications are that economic damage caused by the war is three times that of the 2008-9 conflict," said Gaza-based economist Omar Shaban, referring to the Israeli military operation, codenamed Cast Lead. "It's huge."
Read more: Gaza counts cost of war as more than 360 factories destroyed or damaged
Oppose the Gaza Massacre! Protest Dinner & Movie with Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Jeff Merkley
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- Written by AUPHR AUPHR
- Published: 22 August 2014 22 August 2014
- Hits: 5348 5348
Why have dinner and a movie with Cory Booker and Jeff Merkley for $1000 when you can protest their support for the Gaza Massacre outside for free!
We call on Oregonians of conscience to come out in protest of the continuing support for the siege and massacre of Gaza by United States Senators. We have an opportunity to confront both Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (and doubtless other key Oregon Democrats) for their vigorous support of Israel's current campaign of serial war crimes.
They say their event is about standing up to special interests! Well, that is why WE will protest them!
Protesters will begin gathering at 4:30pm in time for the 5:10pm $500/plate dinner and continue until the movie at 6:30pm.
Protest will start at: Ya Hala at 8005 SE Stark St, Portland
Protest will continue at: Academy Theatre, 7818 SE Stark St, Portland
Perhaps Merkley and Booker will see us as dessert before the movie!
Sponsored by: Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights (AUPHR), Jewish Voice for Peace - Portland (JVP), Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER)
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/ical/event.php?eid=272453246283461
PROTEST! BLOCK THE BOAT, TACOMA!
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- Written by Peter Miller Peter Miller
- Published: 22 August 2014 22 August 2014
- Hits: 5319 5319
Hi all,
The situation is fluid but it looks like the Zim ship that was blocked from unloading in Oakland is coming to Tacoma Washington or maybe even Portland!
Peter
BLOCK THE BOAT TO GAZA was an amazing success in Oakland, and turned the boat around. Now we must follow it up the coast, thus BLOCK THE BOAT, TACOMA For now, get details from the original organizers ofBlock the Boat for Gaza
Friday, August 22at 8:00pm in CDT
Tomorrow
Here is a link to information about the efforts to block the Zim ship coming to Tacoma to unload after leaving Oakland. This page will be updated as this situation changes by the hour:
http://blocktheboatnw.wordpress.com/
The call is for folks to be there tomorrow afternoon and potentially ongoing.
Organizers have heard that it may be possible that if they are not able to unload there, they may attempt to do so in Portland, but they haven’t be able to verify that yet.
Also a Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/530669670411666/