CNN’s Fareed spoke with former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski about Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
Here is the conversation:
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on CNN told Wolf Blitzer that the invasion of Gaza was a strategy to demilitarize Gaza, explaining the use of force. But it has been quite a robust use of force…Do you think that it is going to succeed, the Israeli strategy?
No, I think he is making a very serious mistake. When Hamas in effect accepted the notion of participation in the Palestinian leadership, it in effect acknowledged the determination of that leadership to seek a peaceful solution with Israel. That was a real option. They should have persisted in that.
Instead Netanyahu launched the campaign of defamation against Hamas, seized on the killing of three innocent Israeli kids to immediately charge Hamas with having done it without any evidence, and has used that to stir up public opinion in Israel in order to justify this attack on Gaza, which is so lethal.
I think he is isolating Israel. He’s endangering its longer-range future. And I think we ought to make it very clear that this is a course of action which we thoroughly disapprove and which we do not support and which may compel us and the rest of the international community to take some steps of legitimizing Palestinian aspirations perhaps in the U.N.
Tell your MP to end the attack on Gaza – sanctions on Israel NOW!
Dear [Your local MP] MP,
I am appalled that the British government has not taken action to end Israel’s horrific massacre in Gaza, and I am asking you to strongly urge the government to uphold international law and respect for Palestinian lives.
The British public is overwhelmingly opposed to the horrific loss of life in Gaza. On 19 July, 100,000 people took to the streets of London to call for urgent action to end Israel’s attack on Gaza. Protests have taken place across the country. Just hours after, Israeli troops killed 67 Palestinians in one district alone – the Shejaiya district east of Gaza City. More than 425 Palestinians have now been killed, and more than 3,000 injured.
Yet in a tweet just hours after the attack, the Foreign Secretary was quoted as saying ‘Israel has right to defend itself but must be proportionate. Best way to stop loss of life is for Hamas to stop rocket attacks.’ This is a shocking statement. The best way to stop loss of life is for the UK government to tell Israel to end its massacre. Israel is not defending itself. This latest attack on Gaza is simply the latest stage in a long, brutal, illegal, military occupation.
Please can you urgently ask the Foreign Secretary how many more toddlers, children, women and men will be killed by the Israeli army before the Foreign Secretary intervenes to insist that Israel end its targeting of civilians?
Please could you also ask that the Foreign Secretary summons the Israeli Ambassador and insists that Israel ends its war crimes in Gaza.
This is Israel’s third military assault on Gaza within six years. Successive Israeli governments have been able to carry out brutal assaults on a captive population because they have not been sanctioned for such behaviour. Moreover, components produced in Britain have been used in such attacks. I am therefore also urging you to call on the government to impose an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel until it abides by international law.
We would also urge you to vocally support Palestine’s application to the International Criminal Court so that Israel can be held to account for their crimes.
Yours sincerely,
Here is the link to send this letter automatically : http://act.palestinecampaign.org/lobby/sanctions
An Israeli artillery unit deployed next to the border with Gaza on Wednesday.Credit Atef Safadi/European Pressphoto Agency
TEL AVIV — Even as Israel and Hamas agreed to suspend hostilities briefly on Thursday at the request of the United Nations, a senior Israeli military official said that his government was increasingly likely to order a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip that it had hoped to avoid.
Though Israel initially set limited goals of halting the rocket assaults against it and degrading Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza, the group’s tenacity and surprisingly deep arsenal have led to widespread calls to expand the mission. The military official said only “boots on the ground” could eradicate terrorism from Gaza and indicated that Israel was even considering a long-term reoccupation of the coastal territory.
Hours earlier, Israel called up 8,000 reservists in addition to the 42,000 troops already mobilized. With no progress reported from Cairo, where President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority had gone to discuss terms to end the fighting, Israel’s airstrikes intensified despite what the military official acknowledged were diminishing returns.
“Every day that passes makes the possibility more evident,” the military official said of a ground campaign. The official, who has been briefing Israeli ministers responsible for strategic decisions and spoke on the condition of anonymity under military protocol, said that his assessment was based on “the signals I get” and that the likelihood of an invasion was “very high.”
“We can hurt them very hard from the air but not get rid of them,” he told a handful of international journalists in a briefing at the military’s Tel Aviv headquarters. An Israeli takeover of Gaza would not be “a huge challenge,” he said, estimating that it would take “a matter of days or weeks.” But he added that preventing a more dangerous deterioration in the territory would require a presence “of many months.”
The stark assessment came as Israel bombed scores of targets, many of them homes in northern Gaza, after warning 100,000 residents via leaflets, text messages and automated telephone calls to evacuate by 8 a.m. Palestinian health officials said that more than 1,500 people had been injured since the Israeli operation began July 8, and that several young children, including four boys on a beach, were killed in strikes on Wednesday.
The lone Israeli casualty, a 37-year-old man killed by a mortar round as he distributed food to soldiers Tuesday night near the Erez crossing into Gaza, was eulogized by Israel’s president-elect, Reuven Rivlin, at an afternoon funeral.
In Washington, President Obama called for both sides to exercise restraint, and Secretary of State John Kerry continued making phone calls to the region. “The Israeli people and the Palestinian people don’t want to live like this,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “We will use all of our diplomatic resources and relationships to support efforts of closing a deal on a cease-fire.”
Mr. Obama reiterated his support for Israel while expressing sorrow over civilian casualties. “Israel has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks,” he said. “But over the past two weeks, we’ve all been heartbroken by the violence, especially the death and injury of so many innocent civilians in Gaza.”
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Palestinians on Wednesday sat near the house of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas leader, after it was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike.Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The Israeli military said that 132 rockets had been fired toward Israel on Wednesday, and that 33 of them had been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile-defense system, including several over Tel Aviv and the southern city of Ashkelon.
“We will use as much force as necessary in order to bring back the quiet to the people of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told mayors of the battered southern cities on Wednesday, according to his office.
Mark Regev, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, said an invasion of Gaza was “definitely an option.”
“It’s being discussed,” he said. “I can’t go beyond that.” Asked about the military official’s characterization of the likelihood as “very high,” Mr. Regev said, “That’s a professional opinion of the military.” Then he added, “But you can be assured that opinion was expressed by the military to the political wing.”
Mr. Netanyahu has been fending off demands for a ground operation from some members of his cabinet and party. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been at turns partner and rival to the prime minister, reiterated his call for a more substantial campaign against Hamas on Wednesday, as did Yuval Steinitz, the minister of strategic affairs, who has been a Netanyahu stalwart and frequent mouthpiece.
“It is not possible to ensure summer vacation, a normal summer for our kids, without a ground operation in Gaza,” Mr. Lieberman said during a visit to Ashkelon.
“We don’t need to rule Gaza or build settlements in Gaza,” he added. “We need to ensure that all Hamas terrorists run away, are imprisoned or die.”
Continue reading the main story Video
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President Obama on Middle East Fighting
President Obama on Middle East Fighting
At an appearance at the White House, the president discussed the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Publish Date July 16, 2014. Image CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times
Mr. Steinitz said in a radio interview that it was possible Israel would begin a ground campaign in the next few days. He urged Israel to take over Gaza for a few weeks to demilitarize it, topple Hamas and pave the way for “something else.”
But the senior military official said it would not be so simple.
“We estimate that sitting there and eliminating Hamas terrorism from the Gaza Strip is a matter of many months. It’s not a matter of two or three months; it’s much more than that,” he said. “We have a very good idea of what does it mean to take over Gaza Strip in all aspects: military, civilian, infrastructure, economical. We have a very good idea, and I think it’s one of the issues that the Israeli government should consider very seriously.”
He added: “That’s a huge burden on anybody who would do it. Everything has its own prices.”
The official said the military had a variety of operational plans, including one for a full reoccupation of Gaza, which Israel seized in the 1967 war and withdrew settlers and soldiers from in 2005. But he said it had also considered other options, like “taking specific parts of the strip, taking places with tunnels, places with rockets.”
The current campaign, Israel’s third major military operation in Gaza in six years, followed mounting tensions after the June 12 abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers who were hitchhiking home in the occupied West Bank — a crime Israel blamed Hamas for — and the July 2 kidnapping and killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian in Jerusalem, which the authorities say was a revenge attack by Jewish extremists.
By Wednesday, Israel had struck more than 1,800 sites in Gaza — topping the 1,500 targets hit over eight days in November 2012, when 167 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed. The more intense Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009 lasted three weeks, included a ground invasion, and killed 13 Israelis and about 1,400 Palestinians.
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Israeli soldiers at a deployment area near the Gaza Strip. Over 40,000 troops are mobilized.Credit Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli leaflets dropped in northern Gaza and some neighborhoods of Gaza City this week warned, “Whoever disregards these instructions and fails to evacuate immediately endangers their own lives, as well as those of their families.”
It was unclear how many Gaza residents were heeding the call; Hamas has urged people to stay put, calling the warnings “psychological warfare.” But it was also clear that any military campaign of this magnitude in such a densely populated area would inevitably lead to civilian casualties.
In the poor neighborhoods of Zeitoun and Shejaya in Gaza City, streets were emptier than usual, but a few children flew kites and some men sat in the shade. Many people appeared confused, with some seeking shelter in friends’ homes deeper inside the neighborhoods rather than leaving.
“We don’t know where we’re going,” said Mohammed Dalul, who was driving a donkey cart with his six children and an older neighbor. “We’re going aimlessly.”
The neighbor, Naziha Rukhneh, said, “Nobody is looking after us.”
Around noon on Wednesday, eight rockets were launched simultaneously from nearby. A few minutes later, the sound of a warplane was followed by that of a bomb dropping.
The senior Israeli military official said the campaign had entered “a higher level of operation” but had not yet diverted from its originally stated goal: to restore quiet, not to rout Hamas or conquer Gaza.
“The point will be the exact time when the Israeli government will decide we are going to change method,” he said. “When they feel the current method or the current concept is no longer working for them, I believe they will order the military to do something else.”
“A ground campaign,” he added, “will be much messier.”
Tens of thousands people including Jewish and Turkish Communities have turned out in London to call for an end to Israeli strikes in Gaza. The event organizers stated Palestinians are facing “a horrific escalation of racism and violence” at the hands of the IDF. At the recent Israeli strikes some 121 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian sources. The UN says more than three-quarters are civilians.
The British capital saw the largest turnout with thousands of protesters rallying outside the Israeli Embassy. Demonstrators flooded the streets around the Israeli Embassy waving placards that read “Gaza: End the Siege” and “Freedom for Palestine.”
Furthermore a group of protesters scaled one of the city’s iconic double-decker buses. The Jewish activists also climbed on top of the iconic London bus with a placard which read “Judaism rejects the Zionist state and condemns its criminal siege and occupation.”
Stop the War Coalition, British Muslims, European Islamic Forum, Palestine Solidarity Platform and many other NGOs joined forces for the protest. The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign protesters joined the protest with banners which stated: “Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are currently facing a horrific escalation of racism and violence as the Israeli State pursues a strategy of collective punishment.”
In order for protests to take place safely London Metropolitan Police closed the streets surrounding the Israel Embassy in London. Police Helicopter hovered over the crowd at all times during the protest in London. End to Israeli strikes to Gaza protest ended peacefully after all protesters acted responsibly and peacefully.
[As international pressure continued to build on Israel to end its four-day conflict with Hamas and Palestinian militant groups in the enclave, Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said the Israeli military must abide by international law.
“We have received deeply disturbing reports that many of the civilian casualties, including of children, occurred as a result of strikes on homes,” Pillay said. “Such reports raise serious doubt about whether the Israeli strikes have been in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”] *
Tolga CAKIR
Post by Tolga Çakır.
[caption id="attachment_108013" align="aligncenter" width="440"] Turkish community members at the protest for Israeli strikes[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_108034" align="aligncenter" width="444"] London double decker bus during the protests for Israeli strikes[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_108015" align="aligncenter" width="436"] The crowd and placards showing Benjamin Netanyahu as Hitler[/caption]
*Reference: The Guardian
Is this the Summer of Censorship? In the US, it emerged that the NBC network requested a film trailer remove the word “abortion” in order to be advertised on its website. From New York to Tel Aviv, there are calls to scrap the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “The Death of Klinghoffer”, lest it “inflame anti-Semitism”. Here in Britain, we’re being urged to ban junk food advertising full-stop, the same week as the “Right To Be Forgotten” came into force, which allows those wealthy and clued-up enough to sue internet search engines into removing information they find embarrassing from search results, however accurate that information may be. So major newspapers are being informed their content will not be displayed on Google, but in the interests of privacy, they can’t be informed why, or who requested the block. It’s a misnomer, another instance of what I’ve called our chronic addiction to the language of rights. Hear a mention of a “right to be forgotten” on the radio, and who could possibly object? Rephrase it as “the right to forget Robert Peston’s exposure of the financial crisis”, or as Mark Stephens calls it, “the right to burn the index cards in a library of record”, and it suddenly sounds a lot more sinister.
But the biggest censorship row brewing is one of our oldest. A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a jovial bookseller in Istanbul. We were talking in German, which was quicker for him than English, and closer to the realms of possibility for me than Turkish. Having established, therefore, my interest in Germany, his eyes lit up. “Ah! I have a real secret for you. It’s banned in Germany, you know. The Jews won’t let you read it.” And as I bristled in doorway, uncertain whether how safely I would walk the streets of Cağaloğlu if I confronted him on his own turf, my formerly charming companion pressed into my hands a shiny, newly published copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
I thought of my Turkish encounter this week, as it emerged that the Interior Ministers of the 16 German Länder have just agreed to do their utmost to continue the legal injunctions on publications of Mein Kampf in Germany after copyright expires on the first day of 2016. Currently, the state of Bavaria owns the literary estate of Adolf Hitler, and limits publication in Germany to a few excerpts for official history textbooks. As Sally McGrane reports in The New Yorker, the state has even withdrawn support for an academic edition which plans to publish the text with heavily critical annotations. For example, the passage in which Hitler complains about the treatment of First World War veterans will be accompanied by a reminder that his own regime would later gas 5,000 shell-shocked veterans of that war under his euthanasia plan. But even this official history is an allowance too far for the Bavarian state, which withdrew its authorisation last December (though it gave up on reclaiming its money). The highly respected Institute for Contemporary History is pressing ahead with the project nonetheless, and hopes that it will be able to publish after the copyright expires in 2016 – but the ongoing legal battles which inspired this week’s announcement may yet see the Institute’s years of academic study buried.
Berlin’s caginess over the issue is understandable – Hitler’s legacy remains acutely sensitive in Germany, and in a nation which once centrally instituted state power to enact the most totalitarian of brutalities, the libertarian position of absolving the nation state any ongoing cultural responsibility chafes against a collective memory. To be more cynical, no politician wants to be the minister who brought back Mein Kampf. And as McGrane’s report makes clear, Germany is haunted by the image of “Neo-Nazis handing out the book in school yards”.
But if there’s a danger of Mein Kampf flooding school libraries, it’s not in Germany. In Turkey, where Israel remains the local villain, the book is a best seller. And when I remember my friendly bookseller in Istanbul, I remember how sure he was that the ban would be the book’s unique selling point, his absolute conviction that censorship implied conspiracy. The publication of Mein Kampf may well be a traumatic moment for Germany internally. But as a leading player on the global stage, it also has an international responsibility. Germany’s leaders need to think about how the Mein Kampf ban affects the Middle East, and what it says about the West’s values of free speech, at a time when we are constantly forced to defend ourselves against accusations of hypocrisy. I think I may explode if I hear one more activist claim that the West, collectively, discriminates against Islam, because we decline to ban blasphemy against the Prophet, while Germany maintains its bans against Holocaust Denial or publishing Mein Kampf. This is the self-pity of the oppressor, demands for special treatment dressed up as victimhood. Germany’s bans around Holocaust material are the exception in the West’s approach to freedom of speech, not the rule. But they are a dangerous exception, undermining any claim that Western civilisation promotes an equal playing field of ideas.
Mein Kampf is, of course, unreadable. Seven hundred pages long in the official Nazi edition, it reminds me above all of the screed spewed out by Elliot Rodger, the mentally ill misogynist killer from California. It’s as ragefully biographical – what McGrane generously calls “bildungsroman style”, and what nowadays would be a little-read livejournal entry – with chapters called “In the House of my Parents” and “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna”. If Hitler were female, he’d have included a chapter called “My Bitter First Period”. But even were Hitler’s prose peerless, it would remain important for us to engage with dangerous ideas. That’s why I was horrified to learn earlier this term that at my own university, UCL, the student union had taken it upon itself to ban a “Nietzsche Society”, in so far as a pompous union has the power to do so. (Their published statement on the matter emphasises the union’s dedication to “fighting the root cause of fascism — capitalism”, which is the Closing of the British Mind in a neat nutshell. I thought their job was to help students support themselves). When I was an undergraduate, I encountered Nietzsche seriously for the first time – and sure enough, I felt an odd thrill at finally hearing an intellectual explanation of a philosopher’s name which had always evoked taboo. But there’s nothing like spending hours jawing with purist 21-year-olds about every possible translation of die ewige Wiederkehr to wean one away from fascism. Perhaps, if Germany really wants to neutralize the dangers of Mein Kampf, it needs to institute a new set of punishments in schools. Force your kids to write out lines of Hitler’s verbiage in detention, and there’s no way they’ll waste lunch breaks passing it round the playground.
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It seems like the “new Turkey” under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), who know no limits when it comes to construction, is determined to leave no green areas untouched.
In just the last 10 days, the government prepared draft bills that will allow construction on olive groves, pastures and wetlands.
One draft, currently being debated in a parliamentary commission, permits private investors to build energy facilities, including plants that run on fossil fuels, military defense facilities and any form of construction in centuries-old olive groves.
Another bill, recently submitted to Parliament, aims to enable the authorities to open pastures to construction by extending existing urban renewal areas or defining new urban development plans.
Meanwhile, the Forestry Ministry has moved to privatize the salt marshes at the natural reserve of the Gediz Delta, one of the most important sites for the breeding of flamingoes, while the minister claimed the cession of the salt marshes facilities to private investors would not negatively affect the environment.
Add to these the continuing construction of the third bridge over the Bosphorus and its adjacent rods, which go through the heart of the metropolis’ only remaining forest lands, and the third airport, two major projects Erdoğan depicts as his “legacy.”
The third airport is being built on a 76.5-million-squaremeter zone in the north of Istanbul, and 61.7-million-squaremeters of this area is forested land, according to official data. The contractors, who won the 22 billion euro tender to build an airport with an annual capacity of 150 million passengers, are involved in a bribery case targeting four ex-ministers. But that did not stop the government from making a huge gesture to the firms by lowering the desired elevation of the airport. The changes in the original plan are expected to save billions of euros to the contractors.
The workplace security of the construction sites is also a source of great concern. Since the profit-minded main contractors prefer to work with the cheapest sub-contractors, ignoring all measures for security, the deaths of workers at construction sites has unfortunately become a routine story.
The latest victim was a bulldozer operator, who was killed yesterday when his vehicle fell into a pond at a worksite in Istanbul, the soil of which is being used in the construction of the third airport.
In spite of all efforts to open every piece of available land to construction, Erdoğan and the AKP continue to say they are the “biggest environmentalists” this country has ever seen. Especially since the Gezi protests in June 2013, which erupted to prevent the construction of a shopping mall in Gezi Park, Erdoğan often criticized the environmentalists, which he claimed had “other motives.”
“If you look at how many trees we have planted during our rule, we have planted 3 billion trees and saplings,” the prime minister said last month in a speech in Vienna. “Know this, we are an environmentalist government,” he added.
Yes, you are Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for keeping the trees on the median strips of the highways.
Who needs forests and groves when we can see a couple of trees driving at 100 kilometers an hour?
