Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2009, pages 32-33

New York City and Tri-State News

Emergency Town Hall Meeting in New York City Condemns Israel’s Attack on Gaza

By Jane Adas

	(L-r) Cynthia McKinney, Peter Weiss, Adam Shapiro, Najla Said, Chris Hedges and Alan Goodman (Staff photo J. Adas).

ON JAN. 13—the 18th day of Israel’s military assault on Gaza—an overflow audience assembled at the Ethical Culture Society in New York for an Emergency Town Hall Meeting. The event, initiated by Revolution Books, demanded a stop to the Israeli massacre in Gaza and condemned the “U.S. role in this war crime.” Lawyers, journalists, actors and activists contributed their thoughts in an inspiring evening of solidarity in the midst of dark times.

Attorney Abdeen Jabara, past president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), described Gaza as an open-air concentration camp with Israeli soldiers atop watchtowers surrounding the perimeter. If Israel had truly intended to stop rockets being fired from Gaza, he asserted, it could have done so by opening the border crossings it had sealed with its Egyptian partner after unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza in September 2005.

Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, explained that he was present that evening because of a promise he made himself more than 60 years ago, when he was an American soldier. To his eternal shame, he said, his reaction to the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima was relief, because it meant he would not have to fight in Japan. He promised himself that when another such horror occurred anywhere in the world, he would not remain silent. Weiss spoke about Israeli violations of international law “that occur each minute in Gaza”: collective punishment, failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets and population, and the lack of proportionality. There is, he stated, no symmetry between Hamas rockets and Israeli bombs.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges scornfully quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s reference to Israel’s “war to the bitter end versus Hamas in Gaza.” It is not war, Hedges emphasized, when attack jets and naval bombardment are used against a people with no air force, no air defenses, no navy, no army—it is murder. He called gutless Arab leaders like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, cowardly American congressional leaders, and media absurdly focused on Israel’s threatened security “a betrayal of the memory of all those killed in other genocides.” Hedges described reporters who convey Israeli officials’ statements without challenge as the “poison of American journalism.”

Alan Goodman, a reporter for Revolution newspaper, recently visited an exhibition on the Warsaw Ghetto at New York’s Holocaust Museum. It depicted how the Jews inside the ghetto, having been systematically starved, smuggled in food, fuel and weapons; how they created welfare organizations that the Nazis banned; and how they finally started an uprising. Although they initiated the violence, Goodman asked who today would say the Nazis were justified in suppressing it?

The great British stage and screen actress Vanessa Redgrave said her body and soul are with all Palestinians everywhere, whether Hamas or Fatah, and especially the 11,000 in Israeli prisons. Citing the paucity of media coverage of what is taking place in Gaza and of Israelis protesting their government’s actions, she spoke of media and Internet walls as well as concrete ones.

Actor and playwright Najla Said performed a moving segment from her one-woman play “Palestine” about her reluctant visit to Gaza in 1992 as a rebellious teenager accompanying her “embarrassing father,” Edward Said. She described stepping in Gaza muck wearing her expensive new suede shoes and having her life changed forever.

Adam Shapiro, documentary filmmaker and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), began with a moment of silence—a silence, he said, that is not available to Gazans. Because the source of strength for Israel is not only its military, he explained, but also the seats of international power—especially in the U.S., but also in Europe—the idea behind the ISM is to force the international community to do something.

Former Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney described her experience on the Free Gaza boat, the Dignity, loaded with tons of medicine for Gaza. Invited to join at the last moment, she immediately said yes. Three Israeli warships came at night, shining their spotlights on the Dignity, approaching and falling back. Then, McKinney related, they turned the spotlights off, leaving the Dignity in pitch dark, and rammed the boat three times. The Dignity had had no contact with the Israeli navy up until that point, McKinney said. Israeli officials insisted that the Dignity had taken evasive maneuvers, but a CNN reporter on board was able to refute that live on camera. Also on board were three reporters from al-Jazeera, including cameraman Sami al-Hadj, recently released from six years in Guantanamo. McKinney reported that legal action is underway, and concluded by urging the audience to urge Congress and President Barack Obama not to send one more dime and not one more bomb to Israel.

Rashid Khalidi Discusses Gaza at Brooklyn Law School

Prof. Rashid Khalidi (l) and author Phyllis Bennis (Staff photos J. Adas).

Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi discussed “The Current Situation in Gaza” at the Brooklyn Law School on Jan. 23. The war on Gaza, he pointed out, took place in two parallel universes. In the bubble of the U.S. media narrative, Israel was engaged in justified self-defense against a terrorist group indiscriminately attacking civilians and fully responsible for the situation. American journalists reported from the Israeli side of the border in scrupulous detail about damage from Hamas rockets and relied on Israeli spokespersons carefully chosen to appeal to the West.

The rest of the world, including Israel and those who knew where to look on the Internet, learned of the hermetic blockade that preceded Israel’s assault, and that Israel broke the truce with Hamas on Nov. 4—election day in the U.S. Non-American media, Khalidi continued, emphasized the use of battlefield weapons on one of the densest populations in the world, of whom 55 percent are children, and powerfully supported the reporting with images supplied by Gazan reporters for al-Jazeera and other outlets that were mostly ignored by the U.S. press. Israeli columnists, such as Akiva Eldar and Gideon Levy, were more critical of Israel’s invasion than anything available in U.S. newspapers, he noted.

The most egregious omission in American reporting, Khalidi contended, is anything to do with international law: one could read “acres of New York Times” without finding any reference to “occupied” or “illegal settlement.” This is not a minor matter, Khalidi emphasized. Israel has ignored 52 U.N. Security Council resolutions, all passed without a U.S. veto, and showed active malice toward the U.N. by bombing four of its schools and its central warehouse in Gaza. Israel has disrespected the laws of war—although, Khalidi noted, deploying advanced weaponry against a trapped population hardly qualifies as war. The blockade itself, he said, may be a violation of international law.

What is crucial, he concluded, is that the U.S. and EU adopt an approach based on international law using the same standard not only toward Hamas rockets and Arab states, but also toward Israel.

Phyllis Bennis Speaks at Rutgers

Phyllis Bennis, an author and fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, is co-chair of the U.N.-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine. She discussed Gaza, international law, and President Barack Obama at Rutgers University on Jan. 27.

Most Americans would describe Hamas as an Islamist organization that wants to destroy the Jewish state, Bennis noted. Thanks to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, she pointed out, they now may also know that “Israel helped spawn Hamas” in 1987-88 as a counterweight to the secular, nationalist PLO, the Tunisia-based “terrorists” of that time. Hamas, she explained, is a homegrown organization that, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, provides what the government does not: summer camps, clinics, day care and other social services. In January 2006, Hamas won a majority in parliamentary elections that were as free and fair as possible under foreign military occupation. Voters rejected Fatah, according to Bennis, not only because its leaders were seen as corrupt, but also because they were not succeeding in ending the occupation. Israel and the U.S. refused to accept the election results.

Israel’s assault on Gaza that began on Dec. 27 was a 3-week military catastrophe that came after 19 months of siege. How we judge this action, Bennis suggested, depends on when we start the clock: after the first Hamas rocket; on Nov. 4, when Israel broke the cease-fire; in 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and settlers; or when the siege was imposed. Although Israel justified Operation Cast Lead as self-defense against rocket attacks, Bennis pointed out that the June cease-fire had been working, with no Israelis killed and virtually no damage.

Bennis stressed that accountability is crucial in international law. Israel and Hamas both violated the absolute prohibition of targeting civilians, but she pointed out that the thousand Palestinian civilian deaths as opposed to three Israeli is evidence of Israel’s use of disproportional force. Israel used weapons that according to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are illegal when used against a civilian population, such as white phosphorous, flechette bombs, and DIME (dense inert metal explosives). She described the denial of the right to seek refuge as a possibly unique violation of human rights law. There was safety beyond Gaza, but residents were unable to leave, despite the leaflets Israel dropped saying, “Get out, we are going to bomb.”

Bennis maintained that the U.S. is indirectly complicit for failing to enforce our own Arms Export Control Act prohibiting the use of U.S.-supplied weapons against civilians, as well as for giving billions of dollars of military aid to the 23rd wealthiest country in the world and providing it with absolute international impunity.

The crisis in Gaza came at a particular moment of global optimism. For the first time, Bennis said, we have a president without absolute disdain for people’s social movements. How this will affect U.S. policy in the Middle East is uncertain, but she applauded Obama’s choice of George Mitchell as envoy to the region, rather than one of the usual crowd. When Mitchell mediated the Good Friday accords in Northern Ireland, he first imposed a cease-fire, then had everyone at the table, without asking them to give up their arms or their dreams. What is certain, Bennis concluded, is that change we can believe in won’t happen without our work.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.