In Gaza, We Have Lost So Many That We Love
by DR. MONA EL-FARRA
A relative reacts after seeing the bodies of three Palestinian children, killed in an explosion in a public playground on the beachfront of Shati refugee camp on July 28, 2014 PHOTO/NDTV
Here is the story of my family, just one among many stories in Gaza:
At 2:30a.m. on Friday, August 1, my family received a first “warning” bomb on the roof of their house while they slept. They jumped up, woke the children, and told everyone to run outside. The family lived in a four-story apartment building. Three to four minutes after the first bomb, a second larger bomb hit the building. Part of the family was outside running into the street, but part of the family was still in the building when the second Israeli bomb hit.
My cousin’s son Emad was trying to bring the children together to move them to a safer place when a third rocket hit them in the street and killed them all where they stood. There were body parts everywhere, most of them children. This series of attacks killed nine members of my family:
Abed Almalek Abed Al Salam El-Farra, 64 years
Osamah Abed Almalek El-Farra, 34 years
Awatef A’ez Eldeen El-Farra, 29 years
Emad El-Farra, 28 years
Mohamad Mahmoud El-Farra, 12 years
Nadeen Mahmoud El-Farra, 9 years
Yara Abed Al Salam El-Farra, 8 years
Abed Al Rahaman El-Farra, 8 years
Lujain Basem El-Farra, 4 years
Also, ten more people were injured in this bombing, among them one family member, Afaf, who was pregnant and miscarried her baby.
Counterpunch for more
Killing “snakes” and self
by MICHAEL ALBERT
Yes, for international consumption they fabricate idiotic justifications – mainly they say this is our defense against them defending themselves. And, just to be clear, to those who say that Israel has a right to defend itself, there is only one correct answer. Yes. It does.
And what that means is to escape being attacked by the occupied, Israel can leave Gaza, cease the occupation, cease the racism. That is the only legitimate way for an occupying force – anywhere, anytime – to defend itself against the colonized. Stop perpetrating the crime. There is no warrant for an occupier to get violent. That is just more crime. The solution is to get out.
Z Communication for more
Outrage
by NOAM CHOMSKY
“At least 57 % of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 % are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reports. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 % of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that is becoming even worse as Israel again attacks water and sewage systems, leaving over a million people with even more severe disruption of the barest necessity of life.
Z Communication for more
The Atrocity
by URI AVNERY
If a gang of neo-Nazis had kidnapped a 16-year old boy in a London Jewish neighborhood in the dark of the night, driven him to Hyde Park, beaten him up, poured gasoline into his mouth, doused him all over and set him on fire — what would have happened?
Wouldn’t the UK have exploded in a storm of anger and disgust?
Wouldn’t the Queen have expressed her outrage?
…
This abominable atrocity took place in Jerusalem. A Palestinian boy was abducted and burned alive. No racist crime in Israel ever came close to it.
Op Ed News for more
Dress the Israel Gaza situation up all you like, but the truth hurts
by ROBERT FISK
There was a time when our politicians and media had one principal fear when covering Middle East wars: that no one should ever call them anti-Semitic.
So corrosive, so vicious was this charge against any honest critic of Israel that merely to bleat the word “disproportionate” – as in any normal wartime exchange rate of Arab-to-Israeli deaths – was to provoke charges of Nazism by Israel’s would-be supporters.
Sympathy for Palestinians would earn the sobriquet “pro-Palestinian”, which, of course, means “pro-terrorist”.
Belfast Telegraph for more
Gaza Last Time
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
If you stick to highway traffic through the columns and bulletins of the major media, aside from some passable stuff on the cable news shows, the flow of ignorant drivel seems as toxic as ever, maybe worse, since Israel has tried to empty Gaza of all reporters. The Israelis wipe out whole families, phone apartment blocks to terrify the occupants with boasts that their homes will shortly be blown up, and the Israel claque here stresses the consummate humanity of the attackers. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post celebrates the birth of the new year by extolling Israel for being “so scrupulous about civilian life.” Professor Alan Dershowitz dishes out congratulation for Israel’s “perfectly proportionate” onslaught.
Counterpunch for more
I See Palestine
by LAURA Whitehorn
Israel’s Carnage and Wreckage of Gaza: Crimes, Victims and Witnesses (book review)
In response to Roger Cohen, “Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do,” New York Times, August 3, 2014. . . .
The bias of the cowboy-and-Indians movies I grew up on in the 1950s has long been exposed: swallowing up Native American land was the aim, and the myth of the dangerous savages who threatened the very existence of innocent European settlers was created to advance such expansionist goals.
Yet Roger Cohen and so very many American apologists for Israel recreate that myth, with roles now played by Israelis and Palestinians — and Cohen garbs the Israelis and their expansionist policies in the cloak of justified self-protection against an anti-Jewish world.
I am a Jew (and over the age of 65) who is deeply opposed to Zionism. I do not believe for a minute that at its core anti-Zionism is anti-Jewishness.
Israel is an occupying force in Palestinian lands and refuses to treat the Palestinian people as equals either in humanity or in governance. This is not a war between Israel and Hamas; it is a war by Israel to further control and limit the land and human rights of a people whom the state of Israel has subjugated and contained.
Monthly Review Zine for more
by JIM MILES
Amongst all the news of the carnage and wreckage in Gaza created by the latest Israeli onslaught, Crimes, Victims and Witnesses is a sadly reflective book. Mats Svensson has combined stunning and compelling photography with short, quick, sad and often cryptic anecdotes about his experiences as a Swedish UN diplomat in Israel/Palestine.
The theme is obvious, that of apartheid, and its main barrier is the wall being built by Israel that is slowly twisting and turning through Palestinian land, separating families from families, farmers from their land, capturing the water, the fertile ground, the protected hilltops – separating the people from their freedom and hopes to carry out a normal life. The other main barrier of course is Gaza itself, the enforced isolation of a small portion of Palestinian land, completely under Israeli control and effectively separated from the West Bank both politically and geographically.
In the forward, Dr. Essop G. Pahad writes,
When South Africans visit Palestine most are shocked at how much worse apartheid is there than that of the old South Africa. And they comment that it cannot be called anything other than apartheid.
Global Research for more
Heartbreak: Reporting on Gaza’s child victims
by SARA HUSSEIN
Inside the morgue
At the morgue at Gaza City’s Shifa hospital, employees have seen dozens of dead children. There was stoicism in the way they swabbed and cleaned the bodies of the three in front of them — Afnan, Jihad and Wissam Shuheiber. They have seen broken little bodies before, and they would see them again, probably later that same day. Their clinical behaviour was all the more stark by contrast with the unrestrained pain on the faces of the children’s relatives.
NDTV for more