[Reader-list] Noam Chomsky on GAZA

[prabhat kumar]

Here is a link to recent post by Chomsky on Gaza massacre and its politics.

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20316

"Exterminate all the Brutes": Gaza 2009

 January 20, 2009 By *Noam Chomsky*


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On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless
Palestinians was launched.  The attack had been meticulously planned, for
over 6 months according to the Israeli press.  The planning had two
components: military and propaganda.  It was based on the lessons of
Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned
and badly advertised.  We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of
what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.



That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when
children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets
of densely populated Gaza City.   It took only a few minutes to kill over
225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of
defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.



In his retrospective "Parsing  Gains of Gaza War," *New York Times
*correspondent
Ethan Bronner cited this achievement as one of the most significant of the
gains.  Israel calculated that it would be advantageous to appear to "go
crazy," causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back
to the 1950s. "The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day,"
Bronner wrote, "when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets
simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed
instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza." The tactic of "going
crazy" appears to have been successful, Bronner concluded: there are
"limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war
that they will seek to rein in Hamas," the elected government.  That is
another long-standing doctrine of state terror.  I don't, incidentally,
recall the *Times* retrospective "Parsing Gains of Chechnya War," though the
gains were great.



The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the
assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to
minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words
critical of these vicious US-supported crimes.



Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza
already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency
UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli
military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings
were closed for the Sabbath.  To honor the holy day, Palestinians at the
edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be
slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters.



The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little
if any notice.  That makes sense.  In the annals of US-Israeli criminality,
such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote.  They are too
familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli
invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps
of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible
massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defense" Forces).  The bombing hit
the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people,
according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic
specialist.  The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that
slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and
Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support.  That
included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal
aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from
the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient
fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of
apologists.



All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials.
Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we
have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities."
As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his
remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely
and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from
military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets."  The reasons
were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a
rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would
exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well
understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs
of illegal expansion and harsh repression.  Eban was commenting on a review
of Labor government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin,
presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every
possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a
mood  reminiscent
of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name."* *Eban
did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for
stating them publicly.  Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his
advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not
dare to mention by name.

 To read more click http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20316

-- 
Prabhat Kumar
Ph.D. Student,
Department of History,
South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg,
Im Neuenheimer Feld 330,
69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Mobile: 00 49 17685050077
FAX: 00 49 06221 546381.