Guilt by association: Zionist smear-media specialty

The Anatomy of Smears

Goldberg smears Mearsheimer through guilt-by-association with Gilad Atzmon
How Jesse Jackson was smeared through guilt-by-association with Louis Farrakhan

Researched and compiled by Michael Hoffman 
www.revisionisthistory.org • Sept. 23, 2011

For the past two months, in between writing issue 58 of Revisionist History newsletter, I have been at work on a book that people have repeatedly asked me for since my 1100 page volume, Judaism Discovered, was published in 2008: a condensed summation of its research and thesis for the general reader, priced to sell in an affordable paperback. I did something like that in 2000 with a thin paperback entitled Judaism's Strange Gods that served as a groundwork for Judaism Discovered.

The new condensed book will take the form of a revived edition of Judaism's Strange Gods, though it will differ substantially from the 2000 edition, benefiting from my research into Judaism Discovered and subsequent material I have gathered since 2008. Judaism's Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded is now finished except for the index, which I am completing over this weekend. We will have details on a pre-publication sale offer in the near future.

In the midst of these publishing projects, it has been a while since I offered you a column. I thought I would give you a double-bonus and cram two columns into one.

The first is a hysterical libel of Gilad Atzmon, a Judaic who has written a new book (The Wandering Who?) that presses all the buttons on the aging propaganda machine that generates Jeffrey Goldberg's frenzied boilerplate ("self-hater, twisted and toxic hater, antisemitism, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, grotesque medieval calumnies, conspiracy theories"). This is the Talmudic pilpul that passes for journalism and substitutes for a reasoned argument in Goldberg's mental shetl. He plays to the choir but, admittedly, his choir is large. He's a columnist for The Atlantic magazine and is interviewed by NPR in spite of the fact that Mr. Goldberg helped to lie America into the Iraq war, an apparent venial sin which hasn't dented his media cred. (I did an analysis of Goldberg's relationship with NPR; a video of my brief talk is on YouTube).

We also offer part one of a transcript of a speech by Louis Farrakhan. There is a connection: Mr. Farrakhan talks of how Jesse Jackson was smeared because of his relationship with Farrakhan, and Mr. Goldberg, in his Atlantic column, uses Mr. Atzmon (through no fault of the latter) in a guilt-by-assocation smear of Prof. John Mearsheimer, one of the most reputable and courageous critics of Israeli racism and state terror in American academia. It is Goldberg's task to libel and stigmatize Mearsheimer. Mr. Goldberg exploits Gilad Atzmon in order to achieve this, in the same way Farrakhan's relationship with Jesse Jackson was used to damage the reputation of Mr. Jackson.

Pilpulistic tactics are tiresome -- but dependable as clockwork -- and often highly effective in ostracizing and silencing peace makers and thinkers who are independent of the propaganda requirements of Zionism and Holocaustianity.

Jeffrey Goldberg himself endorses apologists for Israeli killers, denies the holocaust against the Palestinians and helped fake America into the Iraq war, but let's not confuse people with the facts. Goldberg's tantrum is worth studying as counterintelligence, a way to gauge the hallaf of one of yiddishkeit's leading inquisitors.

The following information is brought to you by the donors who support this service. Without their donations this service cannot continue. Consider joining other truth seekers by sending a donation today.

Best wishes in this Great Battle,
Michael Hoffman
Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA

Smear #1

John Mearsheimer Endorses a Hitler Apologist and Holocaust Revisionist
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG

Gilad Atzmon is a jazz saxophonist who lives in London and who has a side gig disseminating the wildest sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He is an ex-Israeli and a self-proclaimed "self-hater" who traffics in Holocaust denial and all sorts of grotesque, medieval anti-Jewish calumnies. Here is a small sample of Atzmon's lunatic thoughts:

"I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws. We should strip the holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place. Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should reclaim our history and ask why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people  stand up against their next door neighbors? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask for what purpose do the holocaust denial laws serve? What is the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocons agents' plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes against humanity......The Holocaust  became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and revenge into a Western value." (End quote from Atzmon).

...Rather unbelievably (or believably, depending on where you sit)...The R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and co-author of "The Israel Lobby," John J. Mearsheimer...has written an endorsement of Atzmon's new book, "The Wandering Who?"...Mearsheimer is endorsing the writing of a man who espouses neo-Nazi views. In other words, he's not even bothering to make believe anymore -- he's moved from a self-described critic of Israel to a corrosive critic of Jewry itself. The blogger Adam Holland, like yours truly, didn't quite believe that Mearsheimer would endorse such a crude anti-Semite...

READ MORE OF GOLDBERG'S SCURRILOUS ATTACK ON ATZMON AND MEARSHEIMER HERE.

Smear #2

Minister Louis Farrakhan speaks of his relationship with Jesse Jackson and the Jews
Excerpted from NOI Research Group Weekly Report--Volume 2, Issue 37 (September, 2011)

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has been personally attacked for two decades by Caucasian Jews who have attempted to label him an “anti-Semite.” The charge is absurd and the accusers have been shown to be the biggest profiteers in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and other crimes against Black humanity. But in this lecture by Min. Farrakhan at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on March 9, 1994, the Minister explained in detail the real issues behind the controversy between Blacks and Jews. Here is the first of a three-part transcript of that historic lecture.

[....] So I would like to address in my closing some solutions, and the Black–Jewish dialogue, if you will, and Farrakhan’s being embroiled in the middle of this kind of controversy. And you can take it or leave it. I have never been anti-Semitic; I’m not now. I have never been anti-Jewish, and I’m not now. But if I recognize something, and what I recognize is not in the best interest of Jews or Blacks, I have to speak against it. And those who fear paint me in all kinds of positions. But I’m here now to defend myself. I never started any conflict with Jewish people. Never! Never. I stum- bled into it. (Laughter.) ’Cause I did.

SUPPORT FOR JESSE JACKSON

I fell in love with Jesse Jackson, my brother, and Jesse told me he wanted to run to be president. He asked me for my help. I said, “Brother, I don’t know anything about politics.” He said, “Would you help me?” I said, “I’ll think about it and I’ll let you know.” We thought about it, we in the Nation of Islam, we talked about it, and we agreed that we would help Reverend Jackson. When Jesse Jackson gave up his position at PUSH to consider running for the nomination of his party for president, he made the announcement, everybody stood and applauded. Farrakhan sat and the tears rolled down my eyes because I knew that the Reverend Jackson was embarking on a course that could lead to his untimely death. Some people rejoice to see a man make that kind of move. Other people who understand what that move entails are deeply sensitive to the danger. I was deeply sensitive to the danger. I had never seen a dossier on anybody by the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) until Jesse Jackson’s assistant, Reverend Barrow, showed me an ADL dossier on Reverend Jackson. And in their dossier, Reverend Jackson was an “anti- Semite.” I want you to listen to me. That dossier was put in the hands of media so that when Jesse would speak, they would raise questions out of that dossier to keep Jesse embroiled in a conflict with members of the Jewish community.

That raised money, but it also would be put in a context that would cut Jesse from support from the common Gentiles of this nation. In February of 1984, ten years ago, Reverend Jackson informed me that there were over 100 real threats on his life. He was told that by the FBI. He was frankly worried, and so was I. So at my convention — the convention of the Nation of Islam — I was introducing Reverend Jackson that year, and in my introduction if you read my words, if you’re a fair-minded person, you could never say that I was anti-Semitic. I appealed to the Jewish community and I said to them that whenever the interests of Jews and Blacks converged, Blacks and Jews always worked together. But when we come of age—meaning we mature, in our self-interest — we have to follow our self-interest, even if our self-interest causes us to be at variance with the interest of the Jewish community.

“RUIN JESSE”

I said, Reverend Jackson is our enlightened self-interest. I said, and the way you handle him can rupture Black–Jewish relations because 90 percent of the Black electorate was lining up behind Reverend Jackson, and members of the Jewish Defense League had interrupted Jesse Jackson’s announcement of his candidacy in Washington, D.C. I was present; I saw it. Then a full-page ad was taken out in the New York Times saying, “Ruin, Jesse, Ruin!”

Because the chant among Black people was, “Run, Jesse, Run!”  And this group called Jews Against Jesse took out an ad saying, “Ruin, Jesse, Ruin!”

Wait a minute. In a political campaign if you don’t like your candidate or the op-ponent, you defeat his program—you attack him intelligently. You put an ad in the paper —“Ruin”? What does the word “ruin” mean? Hmm?

When something is ruined — that garment that you have on that you paid whatever you paid for it — if it is ruined, do you put it on again? To ruin Jesse was the aim of those who put that ad in the New York Times. No responsible Jewish organization condemned that ad. (Applause.) I want you to listen. Now I want you to hear Farrakhan. Since you heard so much about me, now hear me, and give me the same ear that you gave my detractors.

"IF ANY HARM COMES TO HIM, HE'LL BE THE LAST BLACK MAN THAT YOU'LL KILL."

When I spoke, Brother Yusuf Muhammad put my words on this campus in a flyer. Those were my exact words. If you’re sane and intelligent, there’s not one anti-Semitic statement or anti-Jewish statement there. I called on the Jews to sit down and talk with Reverend Jackson. “If you disagree with him,” I said, “we can stand to lose an election, but we cannot stand to lose Reverend Jackson.” I said, “If any harm comes to him, he’ll be the last Black man that you’ll kill.”

Wait, wait, wait, I didn’t finish, no, no— ’cause that’s an implied threat. I said, “We don’t carry weapons. We’re not allowed to carry as much as a pen knife,” I said, “But Almighty God has caused this son of ex-slaves to rise up to such a position, and God Himself will retaliate.”

This is a paraphrase of my actual words, which, they’re out here for you to read. The next day in New York the head of B’nai B’rith was on the radio, calling me “the new black Hitler.”

Let’s stop right there.

Now, I grew up in Roxbury. I went to the Sherwin School, and Boston Public Latin. Didn’t make it there. I graduated from Boston English. I went to Huntington Prep School. Go and search my record. I hardly ever had a fight in my whole life. I’ve never been arrested. All my friends, if you talk to them, they have nothing evil to say about me. I’ve never been a violence-prone individual; not then, not now. All human beings, however, are capable, if pushed to that extreme. I have never said privately to my children, or publicly, Jews should be exterminated. My sons and daughters have grown up in my house. They have never heard me speak of Jews or Italians or Hispanic people using slang terms like “spic” or “kike” or “wop.” I don’t talk like that because I know what it feels like to be called a “nigger” all my life. (Applause.)

 But anybody that knows me from my childhood knows I was a young man of principle and if you wanted a fight outta me, then the fight would never be on no stupid thing, it would always be over a violation of a principle. That’s my history.

"POPE PIUS XII LOOKED THE OTHER WAY" (AS 'JEWS' WERE PUT IN OVENS)

And to call me Hitler. Every young Jew in this audience, whose parents or grandparents went through the Holocaust. What does it mean to them when you say I am a Hitler? Every young Jew would hate that man and want him dead because nobody wants to see a Hitler come up again. What makes me a new black Hitler? We never put Jews in ovens. Not one Black person in this audience has put a Jew in an oven. Gentiles did. Pope Pius XII looked the other way. Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked the other way. (Applause.) You know it. Black people were your liberators from Auschwitz! The first ones in the death camps were Black people. (Applause.)

Now Farrakhan is upset. And shouldn’t I be? If somebody called you a Hitler, wouldn’t you be upset? But why did you call me Hitler? Because of my skill as an orator. Unmatched— no vanity, no vanity, no vanity, no ego. God has given me that gift. I move people. I move people not because I move people. I move people because I am an instrument that communicates to the nth degree to human beings and their pain. I don’t need notes. I speak from the soul, and my speech is like music. Even though it may be uncomfortable some of the passages are so beautiful, because I’m not a hater. I’m passionate over the suffering of my people in particular, but human beings in general.

"HITLER WAS A GENIUS"

So I was inflamed, and I...said, “So here come the Jews now, calling me Hitler.” I said, “Well, that’s a good name.” I said Hitler was no good for me but he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat in World War I. Hitler, with his magnificent oratory, made a people with his philosophy and ideology of Aryan supremacy. He made a people in Germany, and it took the whole western world united to defeat [him]. A nation of only 17 million people had the whole world shake with their genius. Hitler was a genius. The West had deciphered his codes and they let whole towns be bombed so that Hitler would not know that they knew. They knew his commands through his generals. As his generals got it, they got it. And even with that, it took the combined might of all of Europe and America to defeat that man.

I said he was a great man, but he was wickedly great. And I am not wrong. That’s your English language. In the Oxford Dictionary, there are four pages on the word great. Only one of them, one line, says great in a way that it means something laudatory. All the rest is talking about magnitude, significance, impact. The man was great, but he was wicked. I can’t approve of another man putting human beings in ovens—men, women, children. I’m a father. I’m a grandfather. I love my children, and when I look at Jewish children and Palestinian children growing the way they’re growing, to kill each other down the road — I’m hoping that some way we can break that chain. And I know that the only thing that will break it is truth and justice.

But because Zionists saw a threat in Reverend Jackson’s appeal, since Reverend Jackson had embraced Arafat, several years before Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Jackson was hated for embracing Arafat, and since it was feared that Reverend Jackson, if given a platform, could disturb the delicate balance between the Blacks who were all pro-Israel to turn Black people maybe to a pro-Palestinian stance, then to that degree it was in the Zionists’ self-interest to destroy the candidacy of Reverend Jackson by any means necessary. And so, they, when I said Hitler was great, headline came up in the New York Post: “Jackson Pal Hails Hitler.”

Now Farrakhan is the whipping boy. They’re beating the hell out of me to get to Jesse. After a while Jesse can’t take it anymore. He repudiates Farrakhan, leaving me out there now by myself. It’s all right though. It’s all right. I didn’t come in the world with no twin. (Applause.) I don’t need an army behind me to stand up for what I believe. I was made that way and as long as God is with me, then I’m never alone. So now I’m out there. I refused to divide the Black people who were behind Jesse, who loved Farrakhan. I refused to speak evil against my brother because he had repudiated me. This is history. And when I learned that the (U.S.) Senate had condemned me and repudiated me, a vote of 95 to nothin.’ A white Senate. No Black people in it. “Representative” government had repudiated me, for allegedly calling Judaism a gutter religion, which I never did.

I am a man that is not afraid to tell you that I said that, ’cause anything that I say,I back it up. And if I can’t back it up with truth, I’ll apologize to you, for so stating or being in error. I think that’s the proper thing to do. But I never said that. And you know what’s worse? It’s ten years now. And every time they write about Farrakhan, [it’s]: “the man that called Hitler great and Judaism a gutter religion.” That’s the way they put me before you.

Well, since [they believe] Black folk are natural liars and cowards, then my saying, “I didn’t say that; here’s what I said and here’s what I meant”— oh, that don’t mean anything to you. So you never took what I said to have any weight at all, because what you say is the truth, and whatever a Black man says in defense of himself he’s only trying to get out from what his own mouth has spoken. You don’t know me, but you’re getting acquainted with me. I think you know now, you’ll have to kill me to get me to back down from truth, and I’m telling you today at Amherst, Don’t even think about it! (Applause.)

"THE MEDIA CAN'T BREAK ME"

For 10 years, I’ve been in this struggle. For 10 years, I have tried to sit down and dialogue with the Anti- Defamation League. For 10 years, I’ve asked them, “Let’s sit down and talk.” That’s the civilized thing to do. When people have a genuine disagreement, sit down and talk about it. They re- fuse. Rabbis come to my door, sit at my table, we have dinner, we talk candidly and frankly, we embrace each other. But the Rabbis have no power with these organizations that are politically inspired Zionist organizations. They don’t have any power. So even though we come to some agreement, the ADL has never agreed to sit down with me. Fine. I ain’t beggin’ you to sit down. I think it’s intelligent, because you don’t want it to go too far. You don’t want it to get that far, if you got sense. You thought that when the media attacked me, Farrakhan was going to dry up and blow away? Not this one. You can blow away them others, but not this one. Because the media didn’t make me, I’m not a creature of the media. So since the media didn’t create me, the media can’t break me. I guess you’ve learned that by now. The more you attack me, the bigger God makes me grow. (Applause)

And you haven’t learned your lesson yet, but I thank you, media — you really are wonderful. No, I’m serious — I’m not being facetious — they’re really wonderful. No, you really are; I respect you to the highest. Whatever you say to me is all right. You can cuss me out, line by line, word by word, and that’s what you do. But my teacher taught me, “Son, every knock is a boost.” So here we are now. Police all around — SWAT team, bomb squad, mounted police; Farrakhan gotta bring 100 security people. For what? For what? Because one Black man stood up to speak truth as he understood it and wouldn’t back down. And some of those in positions of power in the Jewish community feel that Black folks should back down, feel that we should bend and bow and scrape and scratch. You still bugged out over that Hamitic thing. Ham don’t have no relationship to me. (Applause.)

I am not one of the sons of Noah. I was before Noah. I was before Abraham. I was before Adam. Now, don’t give me no Johnny-come-lately as my father, because I know the history now. And if you scratch me—not scratch me—I mean push me, I’ll be glad to tell you not only where I’m from, but where you’re from too. (Applause.) [To be continued]

LOUIS FARRAKHAN will speak October 9, 2011 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Tickets are $20. All races and religions are invited. Doors open at 12 p.m. Program starts at 2 pm. (www.noi.org) There will also be a presentation from 1 - 3 p.m. in Room 108 of the Convention Center by the Historical Research Group of the Nation of Islam, authors of the books The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume 1 (on the slave trade) and volume 2 (on Judaic influence in the American South after the War Between the States).

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Michael Hoffman is the founder of The Hoffman Center for the Study of Anti-Goyimism. On the Contrary is a public service of Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA. 

 

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Read More

Actual purpose of the Israeli invasion of Gaza

Another War, Another Defeat

The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.

John J. Mearsheimer

University of Chicago

Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.” What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

Let’s begin with Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. The conventional wisdom is that Israel was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and that its leaders hoped the exit from Gaza would be a major step toward creating a viable Palestinian state. According to the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, Israel was giving the Palestinians an opportunity to “build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean,” and if they did so, it would “fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.”

This is pure fiction. Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”

Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.

To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza.

Israel rejected that offer and with American backing set out to foment a civil war between Fatah and Hamas that would wreck the national unity government and put Fatah in charge. The plan backfired when Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge there and the more pliant Fatah in control of the West Bank. Israel then tightened the screws on the blockade around Gaza, causing even greater hardship and suffering among the Palestinians living there.

Hamas responded by continuing to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, while emphasizing that they still sought a long-term ceasefire, perhaps lasting ten years or more. This was not a noble gesture on Hamas’s part: they sought a ceasefire because the balance of power heavily favored Israel. The Israelis had no interest in a ceasefire and merely intensified the economic pressure on Gaza. But in the late spring of 2008, pressure from Israelis living under the rocket attacks led the government to agree to a six-month ceasefire starting on June 19. That agreement, which formally ended on Dec. 19, immediately preceded the present war, which began on Dec. 27.

The official Israeli position blames Hamas for undermining the ceasefire. This view is widely accepted in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked the ceasefire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the ceasefire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first five months of the ceasefire. A total of two rockets were fired into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.

How did Israel behave during this same period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the ceasefire, and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the ceasefire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of the war on Dec. 27.

As the violence increased, Hamas made clear that it had no interest in extending the ceasefire beyond Dec. 19, which is hardly surprising, since it had not worked as intended. In mid-December, however, Hamas informed Israel that it was still willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire if it included an end to the arrests and assassinations as well as the lifting of the blockade. But the Israelis, having used the ceasefire to prepare for war against Hamas, rejected this overture. The bombing of Gaza commenced eight days after the failed ceasefire formally ended.

If Israel wanted to stop missile attacks from Gaza, it could have done so by arranging a long-term ceasefire with Hamas. And if Israel were genuinely interested in creating a viable Palestinian state, it could have worked with the national unity government to implement a meaningful ceasefire and change Hamas’s thinking about a two-state solution. But Israel has a different agenda: it is determined to employ the Iron Wall strategy to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel.

This brutal policy is clearly reflected in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on the horror stories that do emerge.

The best evidence, however, that Israel is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece of real estate. Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 4,000. Over half of the casualties are civilians, and many are children. The IDF’s opening salvo on Dec. 27 took place as children were leaving school, and one of its primary targets that day was a large group of graduating police cadets, who hardly qualified as terrorists. In what Ehud Barak called “an all-out war against Hamas,” Israel has targeted a university, schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices, and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel.” In other words, everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate target.

Israelis tend to be blunt, and they occasionally say what they are really doing. After the IDF killed 40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6, Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us, being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock.”

One might accept that Israel is waging “a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,” as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza.

This is wishful thinking. For starters, Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.

Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be diminished, not strengthened.

More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy to deal with the Palestinians.

There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk.

Emphases supplied

The American Conservative | Jan. 26, 2009

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