1. The Magnes Zionist runs an unpublished op-ed by Joseph Levine, a UMass philosopher and an excellent commentator on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Levine suggests a thought experiment: imagine that in the targets that Israel is attacking, all civilians were Israelis and not Palestinian. Would you then support the attacks? If not, then you are immoral if you support the actual Israeli attacks.
2. An analysis of some of the international law issues raised by the massacre, prompted by a piece by Alan Dershowitz that gets the law completely wrong (has he ever been right about anything?), can be found here.
3. The New York Times has an article on its web site in which it describes Israel as rebuffing peace efforts. In the sixty year history of Israel rebuffing peace efforts, has the NYT ever reported this in a headline before?
4. My quick thoughts on the “human shields” arguments that are being used by apologists for the massacre. It has not been claimed that Hamas is using human shields in the normal sense of the word, the way Israel, for example, has done from time to time. The criticism is that when Hamas fires rockets from civilian areas, it is using the civilians in those areas as human shields. There are big problems with this criticism.
First, where is Hamas supposed to go? The Gaza Strip is a sealed area with the same geographical size and the same population size as the city of Philadelphia. Can you picture a place in the city of Philadelphia that is remote enough from civilians to permit a guerrilla group to operate from there without endangering civilians?
Second: Suppose Hamas had a place to go. What would be the effect of them going there? The effect would be that Israel would wipe the Hamas fighters out in a single attack. Nobody would counsel a guerrilla resistance group rooted in the population to separate itself from the population so it can be easily wiped out, except those who support the colonial project.
Third, what do the Palestinians prefer? The large majority of Palestinians support the resistance to Israeli occupation and terror, even with the knowledge that the result could be mass death. What purpose would be served by Hamas leaving civilian areas? Not the purpose of resistance and national liberation. Are there Palestinians living in Gaza, or non-collaborator Palestinians living in the West Bank, who call on Hamas to leave the civilian areas? Not that I have heard.
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This post was written by Uri on January 5, 2009
i meant also to reprint this poem from primo levi. translation courtesy robert f. williams: http://swordsintoplowshares.blogspot.com/2005/01/if-this-is-man.html
You who live safe
In your warm houses;
You who find on returning in the evening
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a bit of bread
Who dies because of a yes and because of a no
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
Without enough strength to remember
Vacant eyes and cold womb
Like a frog in the winter:
Reflect on the fact that this has happened:
These words I commend to you:
Inscribe them on your heart
When staying at home and going out,
Going to bed and rising up;
Repeat them to your children:
Or may your house fall down,
Illness bar your way,
Your loved ones turn away from you.