Waarom zou de Independent wel grote artikelen van de Israelische historicus Ilan Pappe plaatsen en de Volkskrant of NRC niet?
Not long ago, I claimed that Israel is employing genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated before using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. The responses I received indicated unease in using such a term. I rethought the term for a while, but concluded with even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.On Dec. 28, 2006, the Israeli human rights organization Betzelem published its annual report on Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories. In 2006, Israeli forces killed 660 citizens, triple the number of the previous year (around 200). Most of the dead are from the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces demolished almost 300 houses and have slain entire families. Since 2000, almost 4,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, half of them children, and more than 20,000 wounded.The point is not just about escalating intentional killings but the strategy.AnnexationIsraeli policy makers are facing two very different realities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the former, they are finishing construction of their eastern border. Their internal ideological debate is over, and their master plan for annexing half of the West Bank is gaining speed.The last phase was delayed due to the promises made by Israel, under the Road Map, not to build new settlements. Israel found two ways of circumventing this. First, it defined a third of the West Bank as Greater Jerusalem, which allowed it to build towns and community centers within this new annexed area. Second, it expanded old settlements to such proportions that there was no need to build new ones.Creeping TransferThe settlements, army bases, roads and the wall will allow Israel to annex almost half of the West Bank by 2010. Within these territories, Israeli authorities will continue to implement creeping transfer policies against the considerable number of Palestinians who remain.There is no rush. As far as the Israeli are concerned they have the upper hand there; the daily abusive and dehumanizing combination of army and bureaucracy effectively adds to the dispossession process.All governing parties from Labor to Kadima accept Ariel Sharon’s strategic thinking that this policy is far better than the one offered by the blunt “transferists” or ethnic cleansers, such as Avigdor Liberman. In the Gaza Strip there is no clear Israeli strategy, but there is a daily experiment with one. The Israelis see the Strip as a distinct geo-political entity from the West Bank. Hamas controls Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas seems to run the fragmented West Bank with Israeli and American blessing.There is no land in the Strip that Israel covets and there is no hinterland, like Jordan, to which the Palestinians can be expelled.Ethnic cleansing is ineffective here. The earlier strategy in the Strip was ghettoizing the Palestinians there, but this is not working. The Jews know it best from their history. In the past, the next stage against such communities was even more barbaric. It is difficult to tell what does the future hold for the Gaza community: ghettoized, quarantined, unwanted and demonized.Throwing Away the KeyCreating the prison and throwing the key to the sea, as South African law professor John Dugard has put it, was an option the Palestinians in the Strip reacted against with force in September 2005. Determined to show that they were still part of the West Bank and Palestine, they launched the first significant number of missiles into the Western Negev. The shelling was a response to an Israeli campaign of massive arrests of Hamas and Jihad people in the Tul Karim area.Israel responded with operation “First Rain.” Supersonic flights were flown over Gaza to terrorize the entire population, succeeded by heavy bombardment of vast areas from the sea, sky and land. The logic, the Israeli army explained, was to weaken the community’s support for the rocket launchers. As was expected, by the Israelis as well, the operation only increased the support for the rocket launchers.The real purpose was experimental. The Israeli generals wished to know how such operations would be received at home, in the region and in the world. And it seems the answer was “very well;” no one took interest in the scores of dead and hundreds of wounded Palestinians.Following operations were modeled on First Rain. The difference was more firepower, more casualties and more collateral damage and, as expected, more Qassam missiles in response. Accompanying measures ensured full imprisonment of Gazans through boycott and blockade, with which the European Union is shamefully collaborating.The capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006 was irrelevant in the general scheme, but it provided an opportunity for the Israelis to escalate even more. After all, there was no strategy that followed the decision of Sharon to remove 8,000 settlers from Gaza whose presence complicated “punitive” missions. Since then, the “punitive” actions continue and have become a strategy.First Rain was replaced by “Summer Rains.” In a country where there is no rain in the summer, one can expect only showers of F-16 bombs and artillery shells hitting the people of the Strip.Summer Rains brought a novel component: the land invasion into parts of the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill citizens and present it as an inevitable result of heavy fighting within densely populated areas and not of Israeli policies.Summer Rains, Autumn CloudsWhen the summer was over came the even more efficient “Autumn Clouds:” beginning on Nov. 1, 2006, the Israelis killed 70 civilians in less than 48 hours. By the end of that month, almost 200 were killed, half of them children and women.Some of the activity was parallelled the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, making it easier to complete the operations without much external attention, let alone criticism. From First Rain to Autumn Clouds there is escalation in every parameter. The first is erasing the distinction between “civilian” and “non-civilian” targets: the population is the main target for the army’s operation. Second is the escalation in the means: employment of every possible killing machine the Israeli army possesses. Third is escalation in the number of casualties: with each future operation, a much larger number of people are likely to be killed and wounded. Finally, and most importantly, the operations have become a strategy — the way Israel intends to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip.'
Lees verder: http://www.countercurrents.org/pappe280108.htm
Meer van Ilan Pappe: http://www.stanvanhoucke.net/audioblog/pivot/entry.php?id=25#body
2 opmerkingen:
"solve the problem of the Gaza Strip"
We doen net of we dit niet begrijpen...
Omdat the Indypendent onderdeel van Indymedia is en the Independent in the UK zit?www.independent.co.uk
Niet dat het verder wat uitmaakt hoor.
The NYC Indymedia print team launched its newspaper in September 2000. Its founders had a vision of a radical, inclusive experiment in print journalism that would connect both local and global issues and would speak effectively to both activists and non-activists.The first four-page paper (The Unst8ted) coincided with the Sept. 8, 2000 U.N. Millennium Summit and focused on rising global opposition to corporate power. 5,000 copies were printed. The paper was subsequently renamed The Indypendent and a second four-page issue appeared in October 2000. Six more issues were published during the first year and focused on such diverse issues as the 2000 elections, housing, policing at mass protests, the Rockefeller drug laws, the placing of power plants in poor, already polluted neighborhoods and the struggle to reclaim public space. During that time, the paper steadily grew to 20 pages as more volunteers joined the project.
The Indypendent began its second year with a special “Back to School” issue that looked at the growing commercialization of the public school system. A week later, the World Trade Center was attacked.
Indypendent staffers gathered on the afternoon of the attacks and within 48 hours hit the streets of New York with 10,000 copies of a four-page special issue. While every other paper in the city from The Village Voice to the New York Post called for revenge, The Indypendent was already asking tough questions about the possibility of perpetual war, the loss of civil liberties, the corporate media’s barrage of patriotic propaganda and reprisals against Muslim-Americans. It also provided moving first-person accounts of the pain and devastation inflicted by the attacks and up-to-date information on how New Yorkers could help.
The Indypendent continued providing provocative, hard-hitting coverage of “The War on Terror” and new volunteers poured in as attendance at Tuesday night meetings grew to more than 20 people. The Indypendent also began holding monthly community reporting workshops in November 2001. More than 170 people participated in the first year of the workshops, which have since been expanded and are held several times a year.
The Indypendent began questioning the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq in October 2002 and provided extensive coverage of the anti-war movement that burgeoned in the winter of 2002/2003, including publishing 25,000 copies of a special issue for the February 15 antiwar demonstrations. When the Iraq invasion began in March 2003, The Indypendent switched from publishing a 24-page paper once every 5-6 weeks to publishing an 8-12 page biweekly that was able to respond more rapidly to current events. The Indypendent is currently a 16-page paper published in alternating two and three-week cycles. In April 2004, it began publishing in full color. The following month it celebrated its 50th issue. In the month before the Republican National Convention, we published two special issues with press runs of 100,000-200,000, which greatly increased our profile in the New York area. It was the largest print run by any radical grassroots newspaper in the U.S. in decades. The Indypendent continued its hard-hitting, on-the-ground coverage throughout 2005 while also expanding its cultural coverage to include more book, movie and music reviews. The paper won 11 “Ippies” (awarded by the Independent Press Association of New York) for its reporting and photography in November 2005, the second consecutive year that it won more awards than any of the IPA’s other 94 member papers.
The Indypendent is distributed throughout the New York City area as well as regionally and nationally. We generally print 15,000-20,000 copies per issue and are currently looking to expand our regular print run to 30,000. The Indypendent is the longest-running paper in the Indymedia network. Other IMC print publications include Fault Lines (San Francisco Bay Area), The Confluence (St. Louis), The Public I (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois), Crossroads of the Americas (Miami), The Washington Spark, the Hat City Free Press (Danbury, CT.) and The Cambridge (U.K.) Newswire
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