Masthead graphic based on a painting by Gudrun Thriemer.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Johann Hari, "The true story behind this war is not the one Israel is telling," Independent, December 29, 2008,

The world isn't just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide vests or rockets. Israeli leaders have convinced themselves that the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.

  There will now be a war over the story of this war.

To understand how frightening it is to be a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of Wight but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other, jobless and hungry, in vast, sagging tower blocks. From the top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the Mediterranean, and Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to fall – as they are doing now with more deadly force than at any time since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.

  "Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas."
Ephraim Halevy,
former head of Mossad


Read the rest here =>
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1 comments:

LeDaro said...

It is a sad sad situation. Too much human tragedy and Israel is not earning any friends.