Louise Arbour has recently voiced her opinion (and that of the UN agency she heads) about Israel's "lack of decorum" in Gaza (wait, I thought they left? No such luck...) Attempts to point out this fact have devolved into ad hominem attacks against Ms. Arbour based on years-old allegations. Somehow, in the mix of smearing the messenger the important point has been missed: In spite of it's claims to the contrary, Israel is still very much involved in Gaza, it's supposed withdrawl merely allowing them the pretense of "self-defense" and absolving them of an Occupier's responsibilities - giving them even freer reign to discipline and punish recalcitrant Palestinian children.

P.S. Apparently Michelle has reading comprehension issues.

Read what I said again, and you'll see that I made not attempt to "out" anybody no matter what kind of creeping creep they might be.

What I said was, that judging by activities in this thread and the finger-pointing of the CJC at Arbour, we can adduce that deflection and smear are one and the same in the playbook of Zionist apologia... Whether or not there are CJC creeps on this board is not the point, only that they share in certain tactics of apologetics...

But hey, subtely seems to get lost around here when certain people are involved.

That this might be percieved as 'outing' someone indicates some oversensitivity. What that indicates, I'll let you decide....

[ 24 November 2006: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

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Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians where life is intolerable, a human rights envoy has told the United Nations Human Rights Council.

John Dugard, special UN rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, said on Tuesday that the US, Europe and Canada had failed the Palestinian people by withdrawing funds since Hamas's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist.

He also described the Palestinians' lives as appalling and tragic.

He said: "In other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing but political correctness forbids such language where Israel is concerned.

"If the international community cannot take some action, [it] must not be surprised if the people of the planet disbelieve that they are seriously committed to the promotion of human rights."

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Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq. A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur everyday by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since June 25, says Dr Juma Al Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon. It was on June 25 that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately".

Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

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The crisis began with January's election victory by the Islamist Hamas movement and the subsequent decision by Canada, the United States and the European Union to freeze aid and contacts with the new government.

The boycott, which was implemented first by Canada, was meant to force Hamas to recognize Israel and renounce violence. The government of prime minister Ismail Haniyeh has done neither and, in the meantime, Palestinian society is disintegrating.

With the Palestinian Authority effectively bankrupt, its 170,000 employees have gone without salaries for the past seven months. Public schools are closed, doctors are on strike and gunmen that used to work for the government now roam Gaza, taking over streets at will to display their displeasure.

Statistics show that personal lives are also crumbling under the pressure. The divorce rate is up 17 per cent, and more than a quarter of those who intended to get married at the beginning of the crisis have since called off their weddings. A recent newspaper poll found that a full 50 per cent of Palestinians would emigrate, if they could.

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According to the World Bank, Palestinians are currently experiencing the worst economic depression in modern history. The opprobrious imposition of international sanctions has had a devastating impact on an already severely comprised economy given its extreme dependence on external sources of finance. For example, the Palestinian Authority is highly dependent on two sources of income. The first is annual aid package from Western donors of about $1 billion per year (in 2005, according to the World Bank, donors gave $1.3 billion in humanitarian and emergency [$500m/38%], developmental [$450m/35%] and budgetary [$350m/27%]) assistance, much of it now suspended. The second is a monthly transfer by Israel of $55 million in customs and tax revenues that it collects for the PA, a source of revenue that is absolutely critical to the Palestinian budget and totally suspended.vi In fact, Israel is now withholding close to half a billion dollars in Palestinian revenue that is desperately needed in Gaza.

The combined impact of restrictions, notably the almost unabated closure and the ongoing economic boycott, has resulted in unprecedented levels of unemployment that currently approach 40 percent in Gaza (compared to less than 12 percent in 1999). In fact, Palestinian workers from Gaza have not been allowed into Israel since 12 March 2006, Gaza's primary market and all entry and exit points have been virtually sealed since June 25, 2006 when Israel's current military campaign in Gaza began.

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Each night in Gaza City that first week in November, explosions sounded in the northeastern corner of Gaza: a succession of bullets, booms, bombs, canon fire. On the first night of the onslaught we could still see lights from Beit Hanoun 10 miles from us blinking and twinkling as if nothing were really happening; it was all a dream of fireworks, a distant celebration perhaps. But then, by the second night only a swath of blacked out space lay in the place of Beit Hanoun, electricity-less and water-less as the booms continued unabated for an hour or more and the hum of the pilot-less drones circled round again and again above us, above Beit Hanoun, above Gaza, automated people-monitors taking stock of the activity below. Nobody from Beit Hanoun could leave by day to get to work without announcing to the tanks and the drones that he was prepared to sacrifice his life for a semblance of normalcy. All men between the ages of 16-35 were rounded up onto trucks and hauled away for "questioning". What will happen to them and their families? Will anyone follow up? Will they add to the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, left to rot while their wives and children, sisters, brothers, parents go on struggling to survive?

There lies Gaza stretched 28 miles long in a tumbledown graying, decaying heap, yawning, tired, wretched, full of garbage. Tape gauze over your nose to avoid the smell of sewage and burning trash. Try not to notice the metal-shuttered shop fronts, the empty stores, the proliferation of horse- and donkey-carts clopping along the streets for lack of fuel, the ribs of the tired beasts jutting out from their bellies as boys whip them along to keep going. The joke is the cerulean blue sky illuminating the rubbish tip, the palm trees and purple flowers beaming in the November sun ñ natural non-sequiturs, like the box of fresh chocolates offered to the journalists filming the woman's wounded son as she yells out her frustrations and horror at the Americans and the Israelis who are killing her family. Why? She asks. Why, why, why?

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Decline in health care has tragic consequences. In the West Bank, the strike by health-care staff has continued to affect access to care, with hospitals functioning at less than 30 percent of their capacity.

The ICRC has already documented the tragic consequences that the interruption of health services has had on a population already hit hard by the overall economic decline (see ICRC reports of 15 and 21 November).

The latest data available to the ICRC reveals further decline and an unprecedented health crisis.

No diagnostic services are available and no specialists are working.

The shutting down of all primary health-care centres has put a halt to all preventative and curative health care.

For example, women are not being screened for high-risk pregnancies and there is neither monitoring of chronic illnesses nor dispensing of medicines.

Some charitable and private hospitals continue to function for fee-paying patients, which means that the poor are being literally turned away from any access to health care.

Daily life disrupted by restrictions on movement in northern West Bank Restrictions on the movement of persons and vehicles to and from Nablus and ever-longer waiting times at military checkpoints are disrupting the daily life of residents of the northern West Bank.

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Since March 1 the New York Times has run seventy news stories on Darfur (including sixteen pieces from wire services), fifteen editorials and twenty-one signed columns, all but one by Nicholas Kristof. Darfur is primarily a "feel good" subject for people here who want to agonize publicly about injustices in the world but who don't really want to do anything about them. After all, it's Arabs who are the perpetrators and there is ultimately little that people in this country can do to effect real change in the policy of the government in Khartoum.

Now, Gaza is an entirely different story. The American public as well as the US government have a great deal of control over what is happening there. And it is Israel, America's prime ally in the Middle East that is, on a day-to-day basis, with America's full support, inflicting appalling brutalities on a civilian population. To report in any detail on what's going on in Gaza means accusing the United States of active complicity in terrible crimes wrought by Israel, as it methodically lays waste a society of 1.5 million Palestinians. Of course the death rate is a fraction of what's alleged about Darfur, but all the same, we are talking here about a determined bid by Israel, backed by the U.S. and E.U. to destroy an entire society.

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Is it possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?

That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.

The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.

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[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Without anyone paying attention, the Gaza Strip has become the most closed-off strip of land in the world--after North Korea. But while North Korea is globally known to be a closed and isolated country, how many people know that the same description applies to a place just an hour away from hedonist Tel Aviv?

The Erez border crossing is desolate--Palestinians are not allowed to cross there, foreigners are rarely allowed to cross and Israeli journalists have also been prohibited from crossing during the past two weeks. Only wheelchairs are occasionally pushed through the long "sleeves" of the security check, leading a deadly ill person or someone seriously injured by the IDF to or from treatment in Israel. The large terminal Israel built, a concrete and glass monster that looks like a splendid shopping mall, juts up like a particularly tasteless joke, a mockery. At the Karni crossing, the only supply channel for 1.5 million people, only 12 trucks per day have passed since January. According to the "crossings accord" signed a year ago, Israel committed to allowing 400 trucks a day to pass through. The excuse: security, as usual.

But there has not been any security incident at Karni since April. The ramifications: Not only severe poverty, but also $30 million in damage to Gaza's agriculture, which is almost the only remaining source of livelihood in the Strip. According to the UN report published last week, Israel has violated all of the articles of the agreement. There is no passage to Israel, no passage to the West Bank and even none to Egypt, the last outlet.

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When I was last in Gaza, Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 per cent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." Dr Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30 children, all of them traumatized. He gave each pencil and paper and asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and of women streaming tears.

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