Gaza Related Quotes

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.

Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.

Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.

Indifference is a form of sloth. For one can work hard, as I've always done, and yet wallow in sloth; be industrious about one's job, but scandalously lazy about all that isn't the job. Because, of course, the job is fun. Whereas the non-job---personal relations, in my case---is disagreeable and laborious.

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.

The West’s credibility as a reference for all things human rights related has waned and is now almost non-existent. The war on Gaza has cost them more than just weapons, it has set the West back hundreds of years and tarnished their image as the leaders of humanity.

Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.

The Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.2 Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country. After two decades of a relatively manageable occupation, Begin and Sharon, two fervent partisans of the Greater Israel ideal, had inadvertently sparked a new level of resistance to the process of colonization. Opposition to Israel’s landgrab and military rule has erupted within Palestine repeatedly and in different forms ever since.

This selective vision pervades contemporary Jewish life. Consider the way establishment Jewish groups invoke the Bible to validate the Jewish people’s relationship to the land of Israel. In February 2024, the American Jewish Committee set out to rebut the claim that Israel is a settler-colonial state. To prove the Jewish connection to the land, it cites the book of Genesis, in which—as the AJC describes it—“God promises the land of Israel to Abraham, the first Jew.” It then moves to the book of Exodus, in which “Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery and oppression in Egypt with a promise to take them back to the land of Israel, the land of their forefathers.” Then it jumps ahead to the “books of Judges and Kings,” which “relate the stories of Jewish rulers over the land of Israel.” People familiar with the Hebrew Bible will note a glaring omission: the book of Joshua, which explains how those Jewish rulers became rulers in the first place. According to the text, the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua Ben Nun conquered Canaan from the seven nations that lived there. The AJC’s chronology skips over that.

Israel remains the biggest recipient of US aid, although the Jewish state is now less reliant on that aid than it once was. While this is true financially, it’s protected diplomatically by the US from a tsunami of global condemnation after decades of occupation and frequent wars on Gaza. US backing remains vital to Israel’s relative strength. Nonetheless, in 1981 US aid was equivalent to roughly 10 percent of Israel’s economy, but by 2020, at close to US$4 billion annually, it was down to around 1 percent.2 For this reason, Israel cares far less about even the mildest American pressure to curtail illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank, attacks on Gaza, or house demolitions in East Jerusalem.

The following chapters will explore some of the more formalized “content cartels” in further detail, but in seeking to illustrate how backdoor agreements further increase the existing repression, one example stands out: the close relationship between Facebook and the Israeli government. For Palestinians, many of whom are physically cut off from the world by occupation and border controls, the internet is—in the words of author Miriyam Aouragh—“a mediating space through which the Palestinian nation is globally ‘imagined’ and shaped,” bringing together a dispersed diaspora along with a geographically fragmented nation.24 Social media has not only enabled long-lost relatives and friends to come together virtually, but has also provided space for organizing and the development of an alternate narrative to that provided by the mainstream media, which has long privileged the Israeli political position over that of the Palestinian one. But just as Palestinian activist voices have been historically devalued and silenced by mainstream media, so too have they been censored by social media platforms—while Israeli hate speech on the same platforms often goes ignored. In the summer of 2014, a few months after US-brokered peace talks faltered, three Israeli youth were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank. In retaliation, three Israeli men abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager, leading to increased tensions, violent clashes, and an increase in rockets fired by Hamas into Israeli territory. Israel responded with airstrikes, raining rockets into Gaza and killing more than two thousand Palestinians and injuring more than ten thousand more—a majority of whom were civilians. As the violence played out on the ground, social media became a secondary battlefield for both sides, as well as their supporters and detractors.

Another Unit 8200 whistle-blower said that every phone conversation in the West Bank and Gaza could be listened to by Israeli surveillance. He told Middle East Eye in 2021 that nothing was off limits; Israeli soldiers invaded the public and private lives of Palestinians and laughed when they heard people talking about sex. “It might be finding gays who can be pressured to report on their relatives, or finding some man who is cheating on his wife,” he said. “Finding someone who owes money to someone, let’s say, means that he can be contacted and offered money to pay his debt in exchange for his collaboration

Cambodian business succeeds by employing more relatives. That’s its purpose, it profits by supporting more family: Income minus Expenses equals Employment.

People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including unarmed innocents. People are supposed to read this and say, "Wow, a supporter of Israel is saying that?! He must be honest! According to the United Nations, 96.5% of the deaths in this summer's Gaza War (including Israeli soldiers) were those of Palestinians (2,104 out of 2,179). "Most" means "majority." "Majority" means "more than half the total." 96.5% is not "most." 96.5% is "almost all." Sure, in this statement, "most" might be technically accurate, but it's not precise, sincere, or complete. When you hear "most," you don't think, "Oh, he must mean 96.5%." Also, 70% of the Palestinian deaths were those of unarmed innocents, including 495 children. "Many" means "numerous." "Many doesn't necessarily suggest any sort of relative proportion to the total. 70% is not "many." Actually, 70% is "most." Sure, "many" might be technically accurate, but, again, it's not precise, sincere, or complete. When you hear "many," you don't think, "Oh, he must mean 70%." Friedman does not use any statistics in his assessment. And why would he? It would have sounded quite different if he had written, "People were killed, almost all of them Palestinians, most of them unarmed innocents." But Friendman, who is attempting to make a point about journalistic integrity, is not interested in being specific here. He is practicing "truthful deception.

Part of this myth related to assertions about the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—assertions promoted by liberal Zionists in both the US and Israel and shared with the rest of the political forces in Israel. The allegation is that the PLO—inside and outside of Palestine—was conducting a war of terror for the sake of terror. Unfortunately, this demonization is still very prevalent in the West and has been accentuated after 2001 by the attempt to equate Islam, terrorism, and Palestine.

The U.S. Army states in the Department of Defense Law of War Manual that “It is a legitimate method of war to starve enemy forces… Military action intended to starve enemy forces, however, must not be taken where it is expected to result in incidental harm to the civilian population that is excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated to be gained.” This is the law that American lawyers applied when President Obama ordered Operation Inherent Resolve, the war to drive the Islamic State out of Iraq and Syria. They considered all the precedents and concluded that it was proportional to use starvation as a tool of war. U.S. forces worked together with Iraqi troops to besiege the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. No food, water, or fuel were allowed in.

Va ser una carnisseria, orquestrada precisament per la mena d’entitat que prospera quan no hi ha res que s’assembli mínimament a un futur. Immediatament després, Israel va iniciar una campanya de devastació a tot Gaza. La majoria dels 2,3 milions d’habitants de la zona van ser desplaçats. Gairebé totes les escoles, hospitals i universitats van quedar danyats o arrasats. La retenció deliberada de l’ajuda i la destrucció d’infraestructures han derivat en una fam generalitzada i en morts per malaltia. En nombroses ocasions es va ordenar als residents que abandonessin els seus barris i es desplacessin a «zones segures» on després van ser aniquilats. A algunes persones se’ls concedeix precisió en la mort, a aquestes no: no hi ha un còmput exacte dels assassinats. Potser no el tindrem mai. Quan torni a passar (i passarà, una vegada i una altra, perquè hi ha un poble ocupat i perquè les relatives forces irresistibles, tant de la venjança com de les seves repercussions, es deformen fins a fer-se irreconeixibles per als que s’han vist obligats a enterrar els seus fills), sempre es podrà fer servir el mateix enquadrament. Els bàrbars provoquen, i els civilitzats no els queda altra remei que reaccionar. El punt de partida de la història sempre es pot canviar, de tal manera que un bàndol sigui sempre el que provoca, així l’altre sempre podrà justificar la seva reacció.

When it published its findings on the 51 Day War, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that the Israeli military had em­braced an “open-fire policy...in which residential buildings were attacked from the air or ground, causing them to collapse on entire families.” In other words, the Israeli air force was given authorization to target multi-family homes in precision airstrikes without proving their military value or their relation to any faction involved in the fighting. The policy resulted in a chilling statistic: According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, ninety families were removed from the civil record after the Israeli military exterminated most or all mem­bers. “B’Tselem has no knowledge of who is responsible for formulating this policy under which such strikes on homes were permitted, nor who ordered it,” the organization noted. With unprecedented freedom to attack civilian targets, the Israeli army enacted the most robust fulfillment of the Dahiya Doctrine in its history, obliterating Shujaiya in the course of about forty-eight hours on July 19 and 20. The US Defense Department official who had received internal Pentagon brief­ings on Israel’s assault on Shujaiya reacted with shock at Isra­el’s use of US-made 155 mm howitzers with a kill radius of 164 feet. “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible,” the senior US military officer told Perry of Al Jazeera America. “It’s not mow­ ing the lawn. It’s removing the topsoil.

The soldiers ordered the family to evacuate the house under the shelling their army had just initiated. Then they summoned Mahmoud’s father, Abdul Hadi El Said. As soon as he appeared at his doorstep, they asked him if he spoke Hebrew. When he answered in the affirmative, the soldiers shot him in the chest, leaving him to die. This was one of several cases I documented in which Gaza residents described to me the shooting of older male relatives who had revealed their ability to speak Hebrew. Were the men shot because the soldiers feared Hebrew-speaking Palestinians might be able to decipher their orders? Were orders issued to kill them? I found no answers among the survivors of the shootings, only harrowing testimony that formed a clear and chilling pattern. The Israeli military has offered no explanation either.

The Israeli military had not only torn through the civilian population of Gaza like a buzz saw during the 51 Day War, killing some 2,200 people-more than 70 percent were confirmed as civilians—and wounding well over 10,000; it had pulverized Gaza's infrastructure. Over 400 businesses and shops had been damaged in targeted Israeli strikes, and at least 120 were completely obliterated; 24 medical facilities were damaged, including the Wafa Hospital in Shujaiya, Gaza's only geriatric rehabilitation facility, whose top three floors were razed by tank shelling. A full one third of Gaza's mosques were bombed, from the Al-Amin Muhammad Mosque, a stately structure built in the center of Gaza City with donations from a Malaysian Muslim charity, to the Al-Omari Mosque, a historical treasure that had stood in the same spot in Jabalia since 647 AD until it was brought to the ground by Israeli missiles on August 2. Gaza’s lone power station was decimated by Israeli airstrikes on July 29, leaving most of Gaza without electricity for over 18 hours a day, and sometimes longer. Perhaps the most disturbing figure was the more than 18,000 civilian homes the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Gaza, leaving at least 100,000 homeless or forced to cram into the already overcrowded homes of relatives.

Unemployment and the related feelings of futility and hopelessness create a breed of people who are ready to take action because they feel like outcasts—like they have nothing to lose, and worse, nothing to save.