Harry’s Place

It should surprise nobody that President Hugo Chavez has ordered the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Venezuela in response to the current conflict with Hamas.

Perhaps it’s Jewish paranoia, but what strikes me as much more ominous is this:

Chavez earlier condemned the Israelis carrying out the military campaign as “murderers” and urged Jews in Venezuela to take a stand against the Israeli government.

“Now I hope that the Venezuelan Jewish community speaks out against this barbarism. Do it. Don’t you strongly reject all acts of persecution?” Chavez said.

Wait a minute? Aren’t the apologists for Chavez usually the same people who always try to distinguish between Jews (sometimes good) and Zionists (always bad)? Why does Chavez automatically make a connection between Venezuela’s Jews and Israel?

“Do it”? And it they decide not to “do it,” Presidente, then what?

(Hat tip: Flanker)

This is a guest post by Eamonn McDonagh of Z Word

El País occasionally deigns to run an op-ed piece not totally unfavorable to Israel. Today is one of those days and André Glucksman, the leading French philosopher, gets to extend himself on the supposedly disproportional nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

After pointing out the stupidity inherent in expecting the IDF to limit itself to using weapons similar to those used by Hamas, he asks

If it’s not about balancing out the military means employed then what about the ends being pursued? Given that Hamas, unlike the Palestinian Authority, persists in refusing to respect Israel’s right to exist and dreams of annihilating its citizens, do we want Israel to imitate this radicalism and proceed to carry out a gigantic ethnic cleansing? Do we really want Israel to “respond proportionately” to the exterminationist desires of Hamas?

When we examine what underlies the bien pensant critique of Israel’s “disproportionate reaction” we discover that Pascal was right and that “he who tries to pass for an angel turns into a beast.” All conflicts, whether they be latent or on the boil are disproportionate by nature. If the adversaries were able to reach an agreement on the means to be employed and the ends to be pursued they would cease to be adversaries. Where there is a conflict there is a lack of understanding and each side tries to make the best of its own advantages and exploit the weaknesses of the other. Neither side renounces the right to do this. While the IDF “takes advantage” of its technical superiority, Hamas uses the population of Gaza as a human shield and has no time for the moral scruples or diplomatic obligations of its enemy.

To work for peace in the Middle East it’s necessary to flee from the desire to offer unconditional support to a cause, something not only the fanatics who will stop at nothing are prone to, but also the angelic souls who dream about a sacrosanct “proportionality” which would providentially balance out all conflicts.

In the Middle East the fight is not about respecting a set of rules but rather in order to establish them. It’s good to debate the merits of this or that military or diplomatic initiative as long as it’s done without thinking that the problem has been resolved in advance by the good conscious of the world. Wanting to survive is not disproportionate.

Reports are still coming in about the terrible loss of life among Palestinian civilians taking shelter in a UN school in Gaza.

We may never know precisely what happened, and as is usual in such events, people will decide what they want to believe. But The Jerusalem Post reports:

At least 30 people were reportedly killed and 53 wounded in an explosion in a UN-run school in the town of Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip, according to Palestinians. The IDF issued a statement saying the school grounds were used by terrorists to fire mortar shells at the troops.

The infantrymen returned mortar shell fire into the school grounds, the army said. Defense officials told The Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school triggered the secondary explosions which killed scores of Palestinians on the site.

The IDF released a video taken by a UAV last week showing terrorists firing mortar shells from right outside the school.

“Hamas has in the past fired at Israel and at troops from inside schools, cynically using civilians, as is proven by UAV footage,” the army said.

Now it’s entirely possible this is a self-serving version of events. But it’s certainly no secret that Hamas routinely launches mortars and rockets from heavily populated areas and that it relishes the propaganda value of mass casualties among Palestinian civilians.

And even if you hold Israel responsible for the current conflict, try to look at things from an Israeli point of view. Do you really think Israeli commander said, “There are Palestinian civilians sheltering in that building. Let’s blast them”? If you believe Israelis are capable of such things, there’s not much point in engaging with you. It’s about as credible as a belief that the Israelis intentionally fired on and killed their own soldiers. But keep in mind, the current conflict is in large part a propaganda war; do you think Israel would deliberately choose to hand a propaganda victory to Hamas?

Update: From the usually balanced Associated Press:

The Israeli army said its soldiers came under fire from militants hiding in the school and responded. It accused Gaza’s Hamas rulers of “cynically” using civilians as human shields. Residents confirmed the account, saying militants were seen staging attacks from the area.

(Hat tip: Mar)

David T adds:

Until May of this year, at another United Nations school, this was going on:

By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq’s work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave’s ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s “engineering unit” — its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.

Qiq’s body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, “the chief leader of the engineering unit”, would now find “paradise”.

That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq’s activities.

No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq’s widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.

Further update: Mark T writes in the comments:

Within the last hour, a Palestinian spokesman (whose name escapes me - perhaps someone else who was watching can enlighten me) was asked by BBC News 24 why Hamas was firing from within a school compound. Did they not have some responsibilty to not do so?

The frankly absurd response - that Gaza is the most densely populated place on Earth and that sometimes there is nowhere else to fire rockets from - went, bafflingly, unchallenged.

So it appears Hamas is not even bothering to deny their crime.

(Update: Mark T writes that the Palestinian interviewed by BBC News 24 was Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority delegate to the UK.)

Additional update: The IDF reports that “amongst the dead at the Jabalya school were Hamas terror operatives and a mortar battery cell who were firing on IDF forces in the area. Hamas operatives Imad Abu Askhar and Hassan Abu Askhar were amongst terrorists that were identified to be killed.”

(Hat tip: pisa)

Eric Lee writes to Michael Lerner

Dear Michael,

I’ve just finished reading your article “It breaks my heart to see Israel’s stupidity” and felt I had to reply.

I don’t think we’ve ever talked, but I remember well your appearance some years ago before the central committee of the United Workers Party (Mapam) in Israel. You were asked to say a few words, and, to be honest, your Hebrew just wasn’t up to it, and the audience quickly lost interest. As an American immigrant to Israel, I felt empathy for you. You were clearly a fish out of water. To that audience, you were not a guru whose every word was full of meaning. You were just one more tourist, stumbling into a situation you didn’t seem to understand.

I felt the same thing today reading your article.

Let’s start with your opening. You talk about “Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas” in your very first sentence. Maybe you are privy to some information that I haven’t heard. Maybe the Israel Defense Forces have let you in on the top-secret next stage of the plan. Or maybe you just haven’t been paying attention.

Israel is not trying to “wipe out Hamas”. They are trying to compell Hamas to stop firing rockets at Israel. There is a difference and I realize it may be subtle, but please pay attention. Most informed people – including practically all Israelis – would have stopped reading your article right there. You’d have seemed to be an ignorant tourist.

Then you go on to casually refer to Israel’s “crime against humanity.” I’m not sure if you realize this, but the notion of “crimes against humanity” is not a literary phrase you just made up. It actually means something.

If you genuinely believe that Israel is pretty much behaving like, say, the Nazis, you really are living in a bubble. Maybe what you meant to say was that the killing of civilians – which happens in every war – is a terrible thing and should be avoided. Unless of course you believe that no war is morally defensible, and everyone who fights is necessarily commiting crimes against humanity.

You then go on to repeat the official Hamas line about the cease-fire – how the Islamist terrorists actually respected it, and wanted to keep the peace, but those damn Zionists kept making it hard for them.

You actually went beyond the Hamas line a little bit there, Michael, when you said that the organization had accepted the Saudi peace plan and really was happy to live in peace, side by side with the Jewish state. You actually wrote that Hamas “would live peacefully in a two-state arrangement.”

So you mean that all this talk in their charter about “obliterating Israel” is just so much clap-trap? Really, they are reasonable men and Israel is blind not to see this.

You say they’re offering to trade kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,000 prisoners. As Israel holds more than ten times that number, that sounds positively cheap. Incredible that Israel didn’t jump at the chance to make a deal. But you know those Jewish businessman, always trying to get a better price.

The Hamas you describe sounds practically loveable. And eminently reasonable. What could have possessed those horrible Israelis to reject such an appealing offer of peaceful coexistence, with Gilad Shalit thrown in at a bargain-basement price? Instead they decided to “wipe out Hamas” and commit “crimes against humanity” in the process.

You have some really helpful and original suggestions to make for the future as well. Israel should accept 30,000 Palestinian refugees every year for the next 30 years, you say. And apologize for its role in the 1948 “expulsions”. (Odd – you didn’t seem to ask Hamas to apologize for anything.)

I read in your online biography that you have something of a background in psychology. That certainly explains one passage in your article which stands out like a sore thumb.

I’m referring to the bit about a “basic condition for creating peace is to help each side feel ’safe’.” The use of quotation marks around “safe” and even the verb – to feel safe, not to be safe – indicates to me that you don’t really believe that Israelis (or Palestinians) have genuine reasons to feel for their safety.

So what is the problem? Are the Israelis simply paranoid? Are the 6,000 rockets Hamas fired into Israel (this is all before Operation Cast Lead) – are those figments of the twisted imagination of an entire nation suffering from a mental disorder? Is the problem really about “feelings” — or about actually being safe? Safe from rocket and mortar attacks, safe from suicide bombers, safe from the Iranian nuclear bomb.

The more I read your article, the more I felt that in the years since I saw your embarrassing performance in broken Hebrew – and the arrogance in thinking that you had something to teach – you had learned nothing.

I don’t know if you or your editor came up with the headline, with its arrogant use of the word “stupidity” to describe those with whom you do not agree.

I would never describe you as “stupid”. You are what you were when I last heard you speak – ignorant and arrogant. It’s really the worst combination.

Yours,

Eric Lee

This is a guest post by Michael Weiss of Jewcy

I have already tried to show how Hamas has failed the people of Palestine politically, and how even the most optimistic appraisal of the organization’s supposed “pragmatism” has failed to pan out, even under exigent circumstances in which pragmatism should surely trump ideological purity. However, lest one come away with the narrow assumption that Hamas’s theocratic fascism represents a direct long-term threat only to Jews, I invite you to consider the following speech made by Ahmad Bahr, the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (and a Hamas member), on April 13, 2007. Coming as these words do from the political equivalent of Nancy Pelosi in Palestine, they should not be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric:

“You will be victorious on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet.” Yes, [the Koran says that] “you will be victorious,” but only “if you are believers.” Allah willing, “you will be victorious,” while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: “You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives.” They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America’s nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere. America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims “will be victorious, if you are believers.” Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America. We saw to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.

I tell you that we will protect the enterprise of the resistance, because the Zionist enemy understands only the language of force. It does not recognize peace or the agreements. It does not recognize anything, and it understands only the language of force. Our jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan.

The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: “Son, go and don’t be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews.” He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: “My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son.” Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over 70 years old–Fatima al-Najjar. She was over 70 years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists.

Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet, defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.

One has heard about the cult of death that underwrites Islamic attentats, and it would certainly not strike most Western ears as newsworthy that Hamas is a fundamentally anti-Semitic movement. But that it is openly dedicated to the “annihilation of America” should hit home with sympathizers and apologists, eager to invoke sinister and histrionic moral equivalences between the current Israeli incursion into Gaza and 9/11, and eager to view Hamas as pledged to little more than national “resistance,” albeit draped in colorful religious garb. If anything, Hamas’ anti-American sentiments reflect Iran’s supervisory role as both the party’s main financier and as its imperial guardian in an ideological war that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Levant. (For more on this subject, see Robert Kaplan’s excellent new piece in the Atlantic.)

Unmistakable, too, in the above passage is Bahr’s unctuous tribute to “Sudan.” By this I think we’re on safe ground to assume he was not referring to the black African Muslims being systematically raped, dispossessed, and slaughtered by the Khartoum-backed janjaweed in Darfur; he was referring to the slaughterers themselves. And here it pays to recalls that this note of solidarity with the genocidaires of Sudan was also struck by Osama bin Laden in 2006, who called for global jihadists to wage war against the “crusader thieves” seeking to disrupt God’s good work of racial cleansing below the Sahara. (The “crusader thieves” in this instance were U.N. peacekeeping troops, many of whom were Muslims.)

While it’s true that Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar, who blames the West for “homosexuality, homelessness and AIDS,” has in the past stated that he would not “rule out the possibility of having Jews, Muslims and Christians living under the sovereignty of an Islamic state,” since his party’s bloody takeover of the internal security apparatus of Gaza in 2007, both its direct actions and its callous indifference toward the actions of non-state actors have abundantly indicated the opposite. Violence, coupled with what scholars of totalitarianism used to call “terror in reserve,” have been the mainstays of repressing anyone flouting the implemented policies of Koranic literalism.

A year ago, Hamas agents looted and then burned down a centuries-old Greek Orthodox church and monastery in Gaza. Non-Muslim and Muslim women apostates have been ordered to take the veil, and the consumption of alcohol has been outlawed, regardless of one’s monotheistic covenant. There have also been reports about forced conversions of Palestinian Christians, one of whom, Sana al-Sayegh, is a prominent dean of the Science and Technology Faculty at the University of Palestine International, was alleged to have been kidnapped and married off to a Muslim professor at the university with the complicity of the institution’s president, himself an Hamas accomplice. (The representative of one human rights organization in Palestine claims al-Sayegh converted willingly, but her family insist she did so at gunpoint and is now living under a state of religious siege; they also say she phoned them once to explain as much. Whatever the case, it must be acknowledged that the Science and Technology curriculum al-Sayegh was allowed to use before Hamas came to power bears a striking dissimiliarity to the one currently in existence.) 

Meanwhile, proxies seeking to impress or outdo the ruling regime in messianic fervor have been given license to terrorize with impunity in the Strip. Jihadia Salafiya, a so-called Islamic outreach movement, which was only able to establish its “military wing” following the Hamas coup, is quite candid about its zero-tolerance attitude towards sharia trangression. In May 2007, militants attacked a United Nations-run school for the crime of allowing its students to participate in co-ed athletics. A month later, the group desecrated Gaza’s Latin Church and stole academic equipment from the adjacent Rosary Sisters School. And in October 2007, Rami Ayyad, director of Gaza’s only Christian bookstore, which has previously been firebombed, was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds, his body bearing signs of torture. Though no group took reponsibility for his murder, Jihadia Salafiya’s chief spokesman Sheik Abu Saqer had this to say in an interview with the New York Sun:

I expect our Christian neighbors to understand the new Hamas rule means real changes. They must be ready for Islamic rule if they want to live in peace in Gaza… Jihadia Salafiya and other Islamic movements will ensure Christian schools and institutions show publicly what they are teaching to be sure they are not carrying out missionary activity….Also the activities of Internet cafes, pool halls and bars must be stopped. If it goes on, we’ll attack these things very harshly.

What this indicates is a fully Talibanized statelet on the Mediterranean, doubly appalling when one considers that Palestinian Christians — who number in Gaza about 3,000 of the total population of 1.5 million — have for decades been at the forefront of Palestinian rights advocacy in the West. Can it ever be emphasized enough that under any future Hamas-run “Islamic State of Palestine,” Hanan Ashrawi, Rashid Khalidi, and Edward Said (were he still alive) would be designated second-class citizens, if not outright refused the right of return?

David Aaronovitch in The Times today on the shameful act of historical twinning engaged in by various figures on the left as they insist on comparing Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto.

George Galloway and Ken Livingstone have both been at it with the former pronouncing: “Those murdering them [the occupants of Gaza] are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1942″ and the latter calling Gaza a ghetto “in exactly the same way that the Warsaw Ghetto was”.

It’s easy to gloss over history, but apparently when it comes to holocaust it is absolutely required. The situation in Gaza is bad, but the population of the Warsaw Ghetto was reduced by 380,000 through starvation, mass deportations and extermination.

“Busy people sometimes hurry their reading. Mr Galloway, for example, may only have skimmed the day-by-day reports made by SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. On the third day of the operation Stroop tells how ‘large numbers of Jews - entire families - already on fire, jumped from the windows. We made sure that these, as well as the other Jews, were liquidated immediately”.”

Elsewhere in The Times today Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar warned that the Islamists would kill Jewish children anywhere in the world.

“They have legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine,” Mahmoud Zahar said in a televised broadcast recorded at a secret location. “They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.”

This as the paper also reported that Jewish groups said yesterday that the invasion of Gaza had provoked a surge in anti-Semitic intimidation and violence in London and Manchester. Jewish charity, the Community Security Trust said that the threat had increased after comments by Hamas leaders calling for attacks on Jewish people. On Saturday when three youths tried to set fire to Brondesbury Park Synagogue in northwest London.

Gene adds: Perhaps Livingstone and Galloway can answer this: Were Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto routinely transported to Germany for life-saving treatment, with the cooperation of Nazi authorities?

Last night British viewers had the chance to watch the first part of novelist Deborah Moggach’s television drama about a Dutch teenager who was killed in 1945 because of her race.

Spread over consecutive nights in five half- hour episodes, this adaptation of her timeless Second World War masterpiece doesn’t put a foot wrong. Ellie Kendrick as Anne captures her lively, girlish spirit to perfection - writing down her feelings and observations without a hint of self-pity, always striving to look for the best in a world turned upside down. Aren’t we lucky to be together, she writes, at least we’ve got each other. “It’s like being on holiday in some strange boarding house.”

This morning Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar boasted that Anne wouldn’t be the last Jewish child to be hunted down and murdered for the same reason.

Speaking from a secret location he warned that Islamists would kill Jewish children anywhere in the world in revenge for Israel’s devastating assault in Gaza:

“They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.”

What a tough guy. What a fighter. What a ‘militant’.

Sadly so long as such repulsive tactics have a sufficient ‘anti-imperialist’ gloss applied to them I fear there will always be British leftists who will seek to ‘understand’ and ‘explain’ such barbarism. Prove me wrong in the comments box.

After a long, bitterly-contested recount process, the Minnesota State Canvassing Board has certified Democrat Al Franken as the winner of last November’s Senate election against Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.

Although Coleman’s attorney vows to challenge the decision, I think the odds are pretty solid that Franken will end up taking Coleman’s place in the Senate.

Franken is a former “Saturday Night Live” comedian and the author of several books, including the very funny “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.”

Because the margin (225 votes) is so small, I’ve decided that the reason for Franken’s victory is the botch that Coleman made of questioning George Galloway when he testified before a Senate subcommittee investigating the corrupt Iraqi “oil-for-food” program in 2005. The sadly no-longer-blogging Douglas at Last of the Famous International Playboys got it about right at the time.

Go ahead, prove otherwise.

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen of Z Word

Before today, I hadn’t come across the name of Brian Cloughley. But he’s writing for online rag Counterpunch  - which stubbornly insists upon its leftist credentials despite being a fount of antisemitism - in terms that are indistinguishable from Klansman David Duke.

In defending his nationalist friends in Serbia, Duke has written of “the cadre of Jewish globalists who control American foreign policy.” Spurred to anger by the voice of a British rabbi, whom he doesn’t name but who defended Israel’s operation in Gaza in a BBC interview, Cloughley sounds just like Duke when he declares: “There are thousands like him in the UK and the US. They unconditionally promote Tel Aviv’s plans and policy and wield amazing influence over politicians and businesses. Killing Palestinians is Israeli policy, and these people spare no effort to justify it.”

That final flourish - “these people” - could have been written just as easily by someone satirizing antisemitism as by someone promoting it. At any rate, Cloughley couldn’t be clearer: the US and the UK are littered with wealthy Jews peddling influence on behalf of Israel.

These rootless cosmopolitans cannot be expected to be loyal citizens of the motherland. The offending rabbi, says Cloughley, “isn’t really British. He is an Israeli religious propagandist of British citizenship whose main allegiance is to Israel.” Just as the Soviet Communist newspaper Pravda, in 1949, railed against “profiteers with no roots and no conscience…non-indigenous nationals without a motherland.”

Soviet propagandists became experts in conjuring up euphemisms for the term “Jew.” So, in its own modest way, has Counterpunch. With both, the point is the same: Jews aren’t really like other people. They are disloyal, slippery and much too powerful.

When it comes to their own history, Jews are forever learning the wrong lessons. Elsewhere on Counterpunch, the musician and producer Brian Eno asserts: “By creating a Middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they’ve forgotten it.”

The “Jews-should-know-better” line is one we come across frequently. In terms of the tropes available to anti-Zionists, it is becoming more unoriginal with every passing day. Which is why it’s a shame to see someone like Eno, who has created music of stunning originality, sounding tiresomely like your average concerned celeb. And doing so in a journal that hates Jews to boot.

“Our position is clear. We insist all aggressive military actions against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip stop, we demand all the troops be pulled back, the lifting of the siege and the opening of all crossings, with Rafah first. This is the basic equation. This is our position and we hope the Egyptians will have a positive message. Israel has found that it cannot eliminate the resistance. Israel cannot stop the rocket fire, even after 10 days of aerial assaults, navy fire and attacks on the ground – the rocket fire has not stopped. On the contrary, the resistance is now targeting strategic places in Israel.”

This is what Osama Hamdan, a Hamas spokesperson, speaking from Lebanon, told al-Jazeera, according to Ynet News.

So, given that Hamas, the democratically elected and popularly mandated government of Gaza - as we are constantly reminded - is not seeking a ceasefire with Israel and, on the contrary, is threatening both to continue firing rockets and to seek other strategic targets, why should Israel call off it’s military campaign?

Hamas’s hostile intentions towards Israel were not a secret when they were apparently, we are told, selected to lead in a transparent and democratic fashion by the people of Gaza.  The conflict we are watching unfold is a consequence of that decision. Of all the voices calling for a ceasefire, the leadership of Gaza is not one of them. On the contrary, they are taunting the Israelis towards greater violence. News reports ceaselessy report that Israel is rejecting calls for a ceasefire, but rarely do they mention the fact that so is Hamas!

I find it astounding then that people who claim to have the best interests of the people of Gaza at heart simultaneously defend and promote  Hamas.

Those who march for “peace” should reflect on two things. Firstly, where were you when Hamas thumbed its nose up at threats of Israeli retaliation to its constant rocket barrage? Did you give them moral aid and comfort or did you seek to promote peace then? Secondly, are you not shocked and horrified that you are calling for peace on behalf of a group who categorically reject that call themselves?

Who in the “peace movement” sought to persuade Hamas that their grievances - the security wall and the blockade - were all in place because of their attempts to bomb Israelis and could thus likely be addressed if they stopped bombing? None, I’d guess, because it’s easier to chant slogans about the “apartheid wall” than to acknowledge that Israelis had a genuine fear of suicide bombers. When rockets are not raining down on your cities, it’s easy to ignore and dismiss, isn’t it?

The failure of the suddenly mobilised “peace movement” has been a failure to acknowledge that Israelhas legitimate concerns over the safety of its citizens. Perhaps because it looks cool and radical, it has instead bigged-up Hamas, a thuggish group of clerical fascists, and in consequence has amplified the fears of the Israelis, not diminished them. And thus, it has made war inevitable.

There has been speculation - reasonable, in my view - that Hamas actually relish the death and destruction. They perceive this a victory in a propaganda war fought in the arena of public opinion. That is why they incite more violence. Sane and moral people are always saddened and horrified by the death of civilians. I hope therefore that those in the PSC and the StWC who wave flags for Hamas are not colluding in their sick strategy. I hope the tears they shed for the innocent are real and not crocodile tears.

I hope that is the case. But I regret that I am not persuaded. The call for “peace” - it seems to me - is just another cynical tool used by people who actually have little committment to it. It is deployed strategically but its damage is collatoral and just as deadly.