I guess Opertaion First Rain is over, and the escalation Israel hoped it would achieve has allowed them to move into into Phase II of the Zionist plan to 'pacify' and annex Gaza.

War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers

I don't pretend to be an expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I do know biased reporting when I see it, and the reporting here in the U.S. on that ongoing bloodletting in Palestine is certainly biased in the extreme.

Just look at the latest story, about the capture of an Israeli soldier. Palestinian fighters, allegedly linked to Hamas, in a daring raid, attacked a group of Israeli soldiers near the border of Gaza, killing two and capturing one.

This incident came after a period when the Israeli military has been shelling and rocketing Gaza, quite likely killing a whole family of beachgoers (though the Israeli military claims rather improbably that this was the result of a Hamas mine, not of a shell), and a number of other civilians.

Almost universally in the U.S. media, including on National Public Radio, the captured Israeli soldier is being referred to as a hostage and his capture is referred to as a "kidnapping."

Note that Israeli jails are brimming with captured Palestinian fighters, but this is not called kidnapping, nor are they called "hostages," though they often end up getting their freedom in in exchange for the return of captured Israeli soldiers who are referred to as "hostages," not prisoners.

Take this story in the June 27 issue the New York Times, which states:

"The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered his security services on Monday to find a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip...

"...The groups holding him said that before any information would be disclosed, israel must release all Palestinian women in its jails and all Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18."

The same linguistic bias occurs with regularity in the coverage of the Iraq War and occupation, with resistance fighters in Iraq routinely referred to in the U.S. media as "terrorists." On the rare occasions when those "terrorists" have managed to capture a U.S. soldier, those incidents are referred to as "kidnappings," too.

Meanwhile, captured Iraqi fighters are often referred to as criminals when caught, not as prisoners of war.

It is no accident that this perversion of language is occurring. The Pentagon and the Israeli government both use this biased language in their briefings to reporters, and the U.S. media lap it up and recite it uncritically.

The problem with this is that the average American then has a warped perspective on two important conflicts that are profoundly affecting the political and economic situation here at home in the United States. These readers and viewers, by uncritically accepting the abased terminology that is presented to them, end up assuming that the U.S. and Israel are fighting crime and terror in Palestine and Iraq, when in fact both nations are fighting wars against people who, far from being criminals, are for the most part committed fighters who believe they are fighting in defense of their own nations. That is why they fight so hard and so courageously against such overwhelming odds.

How are Americans going to understand the depth and passion of the resistance to U.S. aggression in Iraq, if they are led by the media's misuse of language to believe that our troops are simply fighting bandits and criminals? How are we to understand the interminable horrors of the Israel/Palestine conflict if we are told that it is simply a battle between the good guys (the Israeli Defense Force), and the bad guys (a bunch of Palestinian hoodlums)?

The media should at least be forced to be even-handed. If Palestinians are "kidnapping" Israeli soldiers when they capture them, then the Israelis are "kidnapping" Palestinians when they do the same. Otherwise, let's concede that both are capturing their opponents and holding them prisoner.

And while we're at it, let's start calling Iraqi fighters what they are: resistance fighters, not terrorists.

 http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/

Israeli "Retaliation" and Double Standards

By JONATHAN COOK

The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza yesterday.

The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a "major escalation in cross-border tension" (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn "a week of progress on two fronts" (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas.

Thus, according to the BBC's analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for "peace" negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of "escalation" by the Palestinians.

We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children.

We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner.

We can ignore the blockade of Gaza's "borders" by the Israeli army for months on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital supplies of food and medicines. As a captive population besieged by Israeli soldiers, Gazans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by Israeli government policy and implemented by the Israeli army.

We can ignore Israel's bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries.

And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been "disappeared", doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice.

None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post -- any more than, in the BBC's worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel's imminent military "reprisals".

In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel's long-standing policy of unilateralism -- a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas -- with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza's population to make it submit to the continuing occupation.

In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants -- the "escalation" -- provides a justification for "fierce retaliation" against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday's Palestinian retaliation against the army.

In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation.

There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC's assessment of the "escalation". Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in "escalating tension". But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an "escalation", even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults.

So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events -- the endless "cycle of violence" -- with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.)

Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism -- as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones -- but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel's own misrepresentation of events.

The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza's civilians from the army's constant aerial and artillery bombardment. "I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza," Olmert said, "but the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents." In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents.

Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as "terrorism", even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being "terrorised" by Iraqi insurgents?

The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel's position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word's usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza's civilian population.

We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight "terror" even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians' shrinking government.

Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people?

Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes?

Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army's belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip's miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza).

And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel's concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters.

This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same "escalation". Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying?

Was the Israeli army's incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won't hear that from any of its reporters.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

 http://www.counterpunch.org/cook06262006.html

Israel won't let Abbas out of Gaza Strip
27/06/2006 - 18:02:10 Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said today.

Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said today.

Abbas is in Gaza for talks with the ruling Islamic Hamas over a document that implicitly recognises Israel. The two sides announced an agreement today, but it was overshadowed by the fallout from the Sunday abduction.

 http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=187250262&p=y87z5x968

Israeli troops roll into Gaza

Strikes hit bridges, power plant as military seeks soldier's rescue

 http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/27/israel.soldier/index.html

So, Israel plays the same game they have always played. They shell the beach at Gaza, killing innocent people, pretend it didn't happen, then when the Palestinians (so we are told; nobody really knows who carried out this kidnapping) capture an occupying soldier, Israel acts like THIS is the provocation and starts killing everyone and destroying what is left of Gaza.

1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies ­not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

15. "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).

26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).

27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)