the USA, Israel, and national interest

Lolz.

Well, I'm sure Mearsheimer, Finkelstein and Abunimah are all great friends of Israel and are only trying to present all sides of the issues. :/

hoos the bad guy

There is a certain inevitability to the story of the 30 people killed by the Israeli army, after it shelled the building it had evacuated them to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/09/gaza-palestinians-israel-evacuees-zeitoun

Is it not a contradiction to imply that commentators should be both "great friends of Israel" and also try "to present all sides of the issues"?

oh great, gavin and flyboy are back.

i dont think theyve ever posted on this thread before

yeah i know. gavin is the creepily pro-milosevic dude.

There is a demo about this issue in London tomorrow. Is anyone going - in London, or anywhere else? Is the Vicar going to organize a mini-demo on Camden Street?

Well this doesn't look very good:

UN: IDF officers admitted there was no gunfire from Gaza school which was shelled
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054009.html

It's a confusing story -- the UN claims that Israeli officers admitted it? Did the reporters not attempt to reach the government for comment? And what exactly did they admit to? Was it an error because they thought the fire was coming from the building when it actually wasn't?

UN ceasefire call goes unheeded I for one am shocked, considering the usual weight of words wielded by the UN.

And yeah, that little detail about the school was buried deep in yesterdays news stories. Not surprised it was missed.

Is it such a stretch to think they bombed the school deliberately (obviously they targeted it deliberately)? Israel has deliberately bombed UN targets before -- it's not like they are huge fans of the UN. I don't know who mark bronson thread cop is, but I'm not pro-Milosevic, I'm anti-bantustanization, which is also what the end goal of Israeli's attacks are. I find it grimly humorous to watch many intelligent people do backflips for 600 posts on how the most recent invasion can be read as Israel working towards peace, even how this deliberate targeting of a school was somehow some kind of mistake. What exactly is your complaint about Mearsheimer and Finkelstein? Not fair-and-balanced enough? The Israel Lobby thesis is weak, but it didn't come up last night -- instead most remarks followed realist political theories backed up with statements made in the Israeli press by Israeli politicians. The Yglesias article Alfred linked above says largely the same thing as the panel did last night, although in much more couched language (Netanyahu is "frustratingly tough")-- Israel is not interested in peace.

It does seem like something of a stretch, yes.

btw contederizer good call on not reading past the first sentence, ugh

Or if you prefer, a NYT op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/opinion/08khalidi.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=RASHID%20KHALIDI&st=cse

One can take a stand against what Israel is currently doing without presenting an absurdly distorted, one-sided and simplistic view of Israeli-Palestinian history. Thank you for random op-ed piece, tho.

considering the nature of war, i would assume that horrible incident was a mistake of some sort, which happen all the time in war. and the consequences of which are usually pretty dire.

the school bombing was an inside job

we decided that this resolution, the text of which we support, the goals of which we support, and the objectives that we fully support, should indeed be allowed to go forward. I believe in doing so, the Council has provided a roadmap for a sustainable, durable peace in Gaza.

Sounds like a vote FOR, wouldn't you think? Wrong. USA abstains.

Was it an error because they thought the fire was coming from the building when it actually wasn't?

Judging by the word "unintentional" in there, the claim's that they admitted two things: (a) they had no good official reason to shell the building, and therefore, by extension, (b) oops, our bad. (This is odd to me, as a shocking admission -- we could probably all agree that the IDF must regularly destroy things it didn't explicitly mean to, right? -- but I guess it is something of an event to get anything other than a defense that it was a justified and necessary part of a routine action and therefore not in error, etc.)

considering the nature of war, i would assume that horrible incident was a mistake of some sort, which happen all the time in war.

I don't mean this too critically, and this is just going back to my earlier thing about abdicating responsibility, but I always worry when we come close to blaming things on "war." You know, intangibles don't kill, Ares doesn't kill.

Hey Gavin, did you actually read any of the thread?

This is odd to me, as a shocking admission -- we could probably all agree that the IDF must regularly destroy things it didn't explicitly mean to, right? -- but I guess it is something of an event to get anything other than a defense that it was a justified and necessary part of a routine action and therefore not in error, etc.

― nabisco

This is true, thought it's a pleasant shock - or as pleasant a shock as possible, under the circumstances. I was "shocked" in this manner by the US military during the 2nd Iraq war, too. Admission of misdeeds absent extraordinary outside pressure. Leads one to believe that the militaries of even the most belligerent nations might be managed by, you know, people.

"Occasionally shocked," that is. Very occasionally.

well i'm not trying to suggest that this mistake allows israel to abdicate responsibility but rather that i seriously doubt that this was malicious, cf. "moving innocents to other location, subsequently bombing said location intentionally".

Yeah, it was a perfectly reasonable comment. I think I just have a hair trigger lately for "well this is what was is" as a sentiment, and had to mention it.

Yeah, it is a ridiculous argument. "This is what a war is" = maybe you ought to have considered that when you started a war.

Ok, one thing that is really starting to piss me off right now is law school classmates posting their Birthright Israel trip photos to Facebook. Hey look, it's my fat, never-known-suffering ass riding a camel!

the accounts of this are going to keep getting uglier:

Only on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement on Thursday, did Israel give Red Cross representatives permission to enter Zeitoun, and what the operatives found there chilled them. Four small children in the Samouni household, so weak they could not stand unassisted, cowered next to the corpses of slain mothers, the Red Cross said on Thursday. At least 12 corpses lay on mattresses and three more bodies were found in another house.

Surviving family members said they were sure more people remained buried under the rubble without food or water, and were in danger of dying. Members of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, told the Washington Post that soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces were in the neighborhood and aware of the citizens’ misery.

“What these family members say consistently is that the I.D.F. was close by,” said a spokeswoman for the group. “This wasn’t some remote area.”

i mean ...

hurting i say this from the heart your jew self-hatred is a source of inspiration and lolz for me in these cold winter months

Wait, and what. If I show an obvious distaste for certain cretinous or obstreperous white Americans does that mean I am a self-hating white American? Give it to me straight. I can handle the truth.

It's ok man.

So nobody's going on any demos?

http://bamalamarecords.com/demos.jpg

My parents went to a pro-Israel demo this week.

the 11am trafalgar sq tomorrow demo seems to have a reasonable message, but i'm fuckwed if i'm gonna spend time among the 'we are all hamas' crowd.

what crowd is that? the one on today's 12:30 London demo?

we are all galloway now

it's being organized by the swp, so yeah, probably; last week's certainly did. (there are plenty of decent people going on the demo too, naturally.)

did pinefox go? perhaps he could liveblog like this guy:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/01/arrived.html

"There's no way they were prepared for the scale of this.
There's an atmosphere of barely contained chaos."

he's not too good with technology, perhaps if you could liveblog from a sliderule

OMG! Hamas completely surrenders!

Just got here and the gathering crowds are massive. It is also rowdy
as hell

yeah so pro-suicide bomber hamas dude azzam tamimi spoke, which must've been edgy.

loving the media lens message board and all the idiot students mailing challenging essays to jeremy bowen and expecting heated debate when all they get is like

hi,

i covered this in my report yesterday.

jeremy bowen

SEE HOW HE IS A STOOGE OF THE CORPORATE ZIONIST MEDIA!!!!!!!!!!

Yes I did go to the demonstration and on the march. It was said that 100,000 people attended; maybe it was fewer, I don't know; certainly 10s of 1000s.

I don't know as much about the issue as others; it is not one with which I have ever been very familiar; but my sense is that the cause promoted today - protest against Israel's attacks on Palestinians and its starvation and disabling of their society - is just. As far as I can gather, Palestinian conditions are desperate, and are presumably getting more desperate year after year. I think that people are right to protest about this.

Pinefox OTM. It's too bad that there doesn't seem to be rhetorical space available for broad numbers of people to rally around that point alone, without too many inferences or distractions surrounding it.

inferences or distractions like being familiar with the issue you are marching on??

i don't mind pinefox being faux-naive generally, ok i do quite often, but here it's a bit have-your-cake-and-eat-it.

- "inferences" like the widespread assumption that having concern for the poverty, lack of security, statelessness, and refugee-style conditions of Palestine somehow goes hand in hand with being insufficiently friendly toward Israel or condoning terrorism

- "distractions" like rabbit-hole arguments about bad guys and tactics and politics that immediately vex things and steer people away from simple and (in my opinion) shouldn't-be-controversial statement that the conditions Palestinians are in are sad, unfortunate, and should not be morally tolerable to any of us over the long term

If being "knowledgeable" about the topic is a way of suddenly disappearing the fact that the conditions of Palestine are just plain flat-out Not A Good Thing, then perhaps some "faux" naivete is entirely in order, you know?