"Petition: IDF targets ambulances"

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3652515,00.html

"Jewish Grandmother on way to Gaza to deliver medical aid."

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/7/115816/7138

"Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7812547.stm

Norwegian Doctor at 1:45 on. Ahh, the guy is probably some kind of a Dane or some damn thing. You remember how they persecuted the Jews in WW2!

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/01/07/us/AP-Joe-The-Plumber.html?_r=2

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) -- Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter's notebook.

The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.

for posting that fine piece by Avi Shlaim. Just a couple of points:

"Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense,"

Maybe mindful of an attitude instilled in us by Churchill years earlier, British people didn't go around acting terrified even during the IRA bombing campaigns. And their bombs actually killed people. And the current thinking on the British Army Rumour Service is that those Pali rockets are bugger all reason to start a war. Soldiers in N. Ireland had ineffective crap like that thrown in their general direction all the time but saw no reason to go off all half cocked.

Those ineffectual rockets are a sign of the Palis weakness rather than their strength. It's what a weakened and humiliated peoples do to try and keep their end up. Its symbolism rather than terror. Liked this though:

"In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

Self pity and aggression is a lethal and repulsive mix. And when it occurs it invariably signifies hidden agendas are in play.

not much going on here...so from my blog today...

Friedman's 'New Ground Zero'

Oh, the phenomenon that is Thomas Friedman! One must give credit where credit is due; the man’s store of dishonest metaphoric platforms that enable public acceptance of violence against Arabs and Muslims seems inexhaustible.

Today, in his New York Times column, he boils down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a comfortingly brainless series of questions: Who owns the hotel?/Can the Jews have a room here?/Shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque? [I'm still shaking my head in disbelief at that last one]. The answers to his questions, not surprisingly, involve backing Israel in whatever military solution to the issues before them they deem acceptable, and denying Israeli culpability in the problems it has engendered for itself with its four decade occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

In an alternate universe of unique physics where these would be valid questions posed with sincerity by a man not completely discredited after nearly ten years of horrendously bad advice on the Middle East, there would still be some problems with his perspective.

First, his sources:

1. Mamoun Fandy of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Fandy once opined that the film Fahrenheit 9/11 was racist and is a confidant of the Saudi king. More importantly, IISS is well known (or should be) for its outrageously inaccurate assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which was then distilled and turned into the famously false Downing St. Dossier.

2. Martin Indyk: This man has Middle East disaster written all over his face. He came to fame as the research director at AIPAC, then as Clinton’s aide on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during Clinton’s disastrous shepherding of the Oslo process. He is about to rise again as an aide to future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Second: His conclusions

A. The Occupied Territories shouldn’t be viewed in the context of a political settlement that answers Palestinian’s need for economic and political self-determination and Israeli security. Indeed, why bother, because as Fandy explains, we can’t talk about “Arab Israeli peace anymore…we may be looking at an Iranian initiative.”…”Gaza now borders Iran.” Poor Israel with its largest military in the region, and its nuclear weapons and its pemanent veto device at the UN security council. None of it was good enough to prevent Iran from directing the entire peace process. No point in negotiating with Gazan Palestinians I suppose.

B. Rather than an actor in a very local struggle for autonomy, Hamas is instead part of a vast “Islamic” war against modernity. Indyk opines that Gaza is now ground zero for this struggle (in 2002 Iraq was ground zero when Friedman famously told Charlie Rose that we needed to put guns in the faces of Iraqi civilians and tell them ‘suck. on. this’). Hamas like al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein will never be happy with just Gaza, or even Israel. They’ll take over the US too. You’ll see.

With this in mind, its obviously legitimate for Israel to kill 600 people in Palestine. Or even a thousand as they did in Lebanon. Its perfectly reasonable, we’ll talk about it again when they reach the same death tolls we leave as our legacy in Iraq.

Ironically, the one question Friedman never asks in his columns: how could I have been so disastrously wrong about everything having to do with the Middle East for over a decade? And of course, the follow up question: how do I still have a job here?

Just in case you want to take a look...

http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/20/israel

Mitchell Prothero
The Observer, Sunday 20 May 2007

[...] Hamas and other militants seem convinced that an Israeli invasion of Gaza is the best plan of action, no matter the cost. In interviews with both Islamic Jihad and Hamas militant commanders over the past month, The Observer learned that both groups badly want to draw Israel into [...] ground combat [...] a reinvasion of Gaza [...] for political and military reasons.

Politically, Abu Hamza, the top Islamic Jihad commander in charge of the group's rocket programme, told The Observer that the only way to unify the split Palestinian factions is a battle with Israel, even if it devastated the already economically staggering Gaza Strip. [...]

- - The Observer, Sunday 20 May 2007

* * * * *

So, Hamas had a political strategic goal in 2007 - - to unify the split Palestinian factions.

And what is Israel's strategic goal in 2009?

Apparently . . . to unify the split Palestinian factions.