“They’re bombing 1 1/2 million people in a cage,” says a Norwegian doctor working in Gaza. The attached video contains pointed commentary by Bill Moyers, who addresses massive media failure and indiscriminate death. So often, the human condition seems to be the same sad story over and over, ever so pointless, because it has always been xenophobic and short-sighted. The perpetrators are almost always too insecure to listen to alternative viewpoints. After all, there are too many people to bomb and we thus don’t have time to consider peaceful options. I’m not describing only Israel, by the way, even though Israel is today’s featured perpetrator.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efm9uAnUU00&eurl=http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/10/moyers/[/youtube]
There are so many things that Americans don't know about Israel. Here are a few things you seldom hear in American media:
According to the Federation of American Scientists http://www.fas.org/index.html Israel has had a nuclear weapons program since 1967. Estimates of the size of their arsenal range from around 100 to over 300 warheads.
Israel's Likud party claims it wants peace. But if you read their concept of Peace and Security, http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/eli… it becomes obvious that they reject the idea of Palestinian autonomy.Since citizenship in Israel is contingent in most cases on having either Israeli of Jewish, when Israel annexes the Gaza strip, the only way that the Likud party can achieve it's vision of peace is by means of an ethnic cleansing. This is typical of the Social Zionist movement.
http://www.zionismexplained.org/index.html has pretty accurate coverage of the history of the conflict between the Israeli's and Palestinians, but it's focus is decidedly pro-Palestinian.
The Gaza strip has been under siege by Israel since the Hamas party won elections in 2006. The reason that Hamas won the election was that they published their plans to establish the kind of civil services that we take for granted. Such as public safety officers, civil and criminal courts, and constitutional law. The US took immediate action against the legally elected government through economic sanctions including bullying international banks into freezing the assets of the Palestinian Authority in order to bankrupt it's civil service. Since 2006, food and medical supply were brought in through tunnels under the Egyptian border. The first attacks in the current hostilities included bombing those tunnels, justified by claiming the tunnels were only being used to smuggle weapons into Gaza.
Israel has no constitution. http://www.idi.org.il/sites/english/researchandpr…
And here in an interesting take by an Israeli
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0924/p09s03-coop.ht…
The American media never seems to mention any of this, choosing to portray Israeli as the victims that are only defending their own people from the "vermin-like" Palestinians that "deserve" extermination.
I think the real reason for this offensive is that the election of Barrack Obama signals a change in the American attitudes toward Israel, and without the right-wing support from the US, there is no longer a reason to hold back.