Antony Loewenstein

The violence in Sri Lanka continues and the hidden cost of the war is becoming clear:

Though there have been numerous reports indicating that the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) has been systematically raping Tamil women fleeing the country’s war zone for the past four months, the Sri Lankan government’s brutal methods of media censorship have almost entirely prevented these stories from being publicized. The most notable exceptions are two articles in the Tamil media, one that reported “130 women were taken for sexual abuse” after fleeing the war zone by SLA soldiers, and one that described “shocking stories of sexual violence meted out” to Tamil women civilian detainees in military-run detention camps. However, the untold personal accounts from witnesses and victims of these crimes are countless.

How to stop cyber warfare in the future.

A country dedicated to peace?

Israel‘s previous government built or issued bids for some 9,000 homes for Israelis in Jerusalem and the West Bank, despite its promise to pursue a peace deal with the Palestinians, settlement monitors said Monday, summarizing Ehud Olmert‘s three years as prime minister.

A small victory in a long struggle that overwhelms every day:

Palestinian and international demonstrators managed to convince Israeli settlers to re-route a road around a West Bank village on Sunday, a house from demolition.

By nonviolently blocking construction vehicles on their way to build a road in the village of Umm Al-Kheir, the protesters forced Israelis from the settlement of Karmel to change the route of the planned road, according to fieldworkers with the organization Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).

Relying on US influence to shift this outrage is probably a fool’s game.

Jews are the “chosen people”.

One of the key problems with this delusion, of course, is that it gives Jews the justification to commit crimes against the Palestinians and defend them because Jews are “chosen” and therefore God will support whatever they do.

Take this from the Jerusalem Post:

Until our own day, the clannishness of the Jews is a frequent theme of anti-Semites (even as others attack us for our attempts to penetrate every area of gentile society. Anti-Semites of a Hegelian bent synthesize the two claims: Jews attempt to enter everywhere to advance their group interests). Those who accuse Israel of war crimes often attribute those “crimes” to the Jews’ belief that only their lives are of value and gentile blood may be freely shed. (In reality, no army in history has shed so much of its own blood to preserve that of enemy civilians as the IDF.)

Such perverted logic is apparent in so many Jewish justifications for behaviour in Palestine. This letter in last week’s Australian Jewish News continues the trend:

The overwhelming majority of Israelis and Jews everywhere continue to be guided by decency, humanity and a desire for a territorial settlement and peace with Israel’s neighbours… [and Israel] truly remains a light unto the nations.

The repeating of such dogma year and year, when the evidence points overwhelmingly to a corrupted Israel, is a defining failure of contemporary Judaism. “We” are merely defending our country. “We” are chosen. But how to defend ever-expanding settlements? How to defend the carnage in Gaza?

One can always rationalise things in some way or another. But Israel is becoming a fortress, loathed by most of the world. Maybe time to change its behaviour?

Quite a success story.

One more tragic example of Gaza’s isolation thanks to Israeli bombardment and a Western-supposed siege:

UN agencies and the health ministry in Gaza are working to strengthen communicable disease surveillance systems in Gaza, in light of the fact that leaking sewage may be contaminating drinking water.

The amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.

The issue of Egypt’s repression of dissenters and Muslim Brotherhood bloggers gets little coverage in the West. Is this because Egypt is a “moderate and pro-Western” dictatorship? Perhaps.

I was interviewed last week by the US radio show, The World, about the detention of blogger Abdel Rahman Fares:

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Why, asks Geoffrey Alderman in the Guardian, isn’t the carnage in Sri Lanka receiving blanket coverage in the UK and internationally?

I’ll tell you why. Because Sri Lanka is not Israel. Because the Tamils are not Arabs. And because here, in the UK, the Tamil vote is negligible whereas the Muslim vote is not.

Yes, I know there have been some violent scenes in Parliament Square, which is even now occupied by Tamil protesters. But that’s the point. The protesters and the hunger strikers are all Tamils. Where are the homegrown cheerleaders that spearheaded protests in London during the recent military action by Israel in Gaza? Tony Benn, for example? George Galloway? Jenny Tonge? Come to that, where is the saturation media coverage of the Sri Lankan assault on the remaining Tamil strongholds?

Whenever I complain about the British media’s obsession with Israel and its problems with some of its Arab neighbours, I can count on someone to tell me that I’m paranoid. But I’m not, am I? The human tragedy unfolding in Sri Lanka, and its totally peripheral treatment by the media, the British government and the British political elite – not to mention the international community – does, I am very sorry to say, prove my point.

It’s an interesting question, though Palestine remains central to world concerns because it’s utterly supported in its crimes by the Western powers; funded, armed and defended.

This doesn’t mean that the Tamil issue should be ignored.

Rachel Johnson, an Australian human rights activist with the International Solidarity Movement, was in Gaza during the recent war. I heard her speak recently in Sydney and she articulated the indiscriminate shooting, shelling and killing by the IDF in the occupied zone. She explains more:

“The huge civilian death toll is largely a result of the fact that houses were destroyed while the residents were still inside”. She said that in the village of Khoza’a, “Israeli bulldozers tried to bury more than 200 of the residents of the village alive, using debris from the bulldozed houses … When they tried to run, they were shot at … Finally they were able to crawl away and most of them survived.” However, 15 people were killed in Khoza’a on that night. In addition, 150 houses were destroyed. 

Johnson told DA that “the bombing of houses created an intense level of fear and helplessness among the residents of Gaza”. She “often encountered the rhetorical cry ‘Where could we go? There is nowhere that was safe. We would think to go to the school, but they bomb the schools. We would go the mosque, but they bomb the mosques.’”

Another day and another announcement that Israel continues to flout international norms, law and decency:

Israel has taken a step towards expanding the largest settlement in the West Bank, a move Palestinians warn will leave their future state unviable and further isolate its future capital, East Jerusalem

The Israeli Peace Now group, which monitors settlement growth, said it had obtained plans drawn up by experts that the interior ministry had commissioned which call for expanding the sprawling Maale Adumim settlement near Jerusalem southward by 1200 hectares, placing what is now the separate smaller settlement of Kedar within Maale Adumim’s boundaries.

But Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist who has spent the last months opening up the debate in the American mainstream over the Middle East, has another column today that furthers his argument:

The sparring between the United States and Israel has begun, and that’s a good thing. Israel’s interests are not served by an uncritical American administration. The Jewish state emerged less secure and less loved from Washington’s post-9/11 Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.

The criticism of the center-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come from an unlikely source: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She’s transitioned with aplomb from the calculation of her interests that she made as a senator from New York to a cool assessment of U.S. interests. These do not always coincide with Israel’s.

I hear that Clinton was shocked by what she saw on her visit last month to the West Bank. This is not surprising. The transition from Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle to the donkeys, carts and idle people beyond the separation wall is brutal. If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering.

In fact, you don’t so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers’ cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers.

The whole desolate West Bank scene is punctuated with garrison-like settlements on hilltops. If you’re looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

So will the Obama administration really pressure Israel to cease all illegal constructions and get serious about peace?

The US has finally released a strong statement about the massacres in Sri Lanka.

But while talk is important, the realities on the ground remain dire. This report from somebody in the conflict zone itself:

More than 1500 people, innocent civilians perished today.  Who knows?  The number will certainly be more.  What hurts the most is that these people held on to their lives for this long since this tragic displacement began taking lives in large numbers in January 2009.  They lived with the hope that someone out there will show a face of humanity and protect them.  They moved from place to place, building bunkers for their safety each time they moved, from Mannar district to Mullaithivu district. They lived with the hope that the demands of their brotherns in foreign lands to their respective governments will bear fruit one day.  Now, they are gone.  I cannot walk to them.  I cannot run there to help them.  They are only a few kilo metres from the bunker I currently live in. The wounded might still be lying there until someone with the strongest heart can get to them.

Thamilsudar

How many more Tamils need to die before the Sri Lankan government is forced to stop?