And the Trudeau Government's Reaction Is? But A Real Canadian Hero Emerges in Gaza.

Dr. Tarek Loubani in blue scrubs.

A tweet. That's how the government of Justin Trudeau responded to yesterday's massacre of Palestinians by Israeli snipers and Justin's bestie, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Deeply concerned by violence in Gaza Strip. We are saddened by deaths + injuries that occurred today + over past weeks. It is inexcusable that civilians, journalists + children have been victims. All parties to the conflict have a responsibility to ensure civilians are protected.
— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) May 14, 2018

The "all parties" business has a touch of Trump's response to the Charlottesville violence last August that led to the murder of a protester. Trump tried to claim some moral equivalence for both sides, including his white supremacist supporters.

Chrystia is not just "deeply concerned" but even "saddened" by this ongoing carnage. What a load of whitewash made all the worse by the fact that Israeli snipers deliberately targeted medical personnel at the protests, bagging 19 doctors and paramedics for the day, one of them, a Canadian doctor from London, Ontario, Tarek Loubani.

Dr. Tarek Loubani said it happened during a "lull" in the protest Monday, as he was standing with a group of paramedics about 25 metres away from the protest area 

"There were no fires, there was no smoke. We had clear lines of sight to all three fortified sniper posts," said Loubani.

"All of the sudden I heard a bang, and I found myself on the ground. I looked at my leg, I saw blood."

Loubani said his colleague, a paramedic named Musa Abuhassanin, came over and began working on his injured leg. 

About an hour later, Abuhassanin was shot [in the throat] and killed while attempting to rescue another person, Loubani said. 

"The first rule of medical rescue is that you don't become part of the situation, you're no good to anybody if you're shot too," said Loubani, adding that his team had taken extraordinary measures to identify themselves to snipers as medical professionals. 

Loubani wore a full green outfit; the paramedics wore high-visibility vests.

"Deeply saddened." Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Sure.

UPDATE - Canada's own hero in Gaza.

Well there is an uplifting story for Canada in this after all. It has to do with noneother than Dr. Tarek Loubani who is featured in an interview with 3Dprint.com and the tourniquets that have saved so many civilian lives in Gaza.

Dr. Loubani is known for creating a 3D printed stethoscope that recently received clinical validation and was made for about 30 cents. Because of the blockade, hospitals in the Gaza region have faced a critical shortage of medical supplies, even simple ones like stethoscopes. The goal of the open source Glia Project is to create those much-needed medical supplies using 3D printing and make them available to whoever needs them. As Dr. Loubani, along with Dr. Mohammed Al-Attar and 25 other trained first responders entered the field at the protest site, they brought with them hundreds of 3D printed tourniquets, ready to attend to those with severe limb injuries.

“Reducing hemorrhagic deaths from limb exsanguination became a cornerstone project of the newly formed Hayat Center for Emergency and Crisis Management, based at the Islamic University of Gaza,” Dr. Loubani said. “The center has been engaged in projects like Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), Basic Life Support (BLS) and Trauma Life Support (TLS). When the center tried to obtain CAT tourniquets for its new ‘Stop Bleeding’ campaign, they were almost impossible to obtain.”

This was due to the high cost of the tourniquets as well as the blockade – however, as Dr. Loubani points out, even if they could obtain Combat Application Tourniquets, CATs are specifically designed for soldiers, grown men with larger limbs. The Gaza population is mostly children, with nearly 45% under the age of 14.

“CATs do not work on a pediatric population, which would have automatically excluded most of the patient population we expect,” Dr. Loubani said.

So when the Glia Project team was approached by the Hayat Center and members of Gaza’s disaster committee, they readily agreed to develop a tourniquet using their locally manufactured, solar powered Prusa i3 MK2 3D printers and locally available and recycled filament. The team created the tourniquet for both adult and pediatric use, beginning about a year ago and reaching the field trial stage by early 2018.

“We dry-tested the tourniquets in laboratory conditions. Even in initial paramedic field trials, tourniquets were generally deployed in single-victim situations with controlled scenes,” he said. “In the field, we were trying to put tourniquets on patients while literally running, under live fire, being teargassed, or occasionally all three. This was suboptimal.”

The team returned to the field on May 14th, armed with 200 tourniquets. The old models were pulled, and the 100 units at the Hayat Center were recovered for field use. 78 of the tourniquets were used on patients whose injuries met the criteria, and not a single one failed. That didn’t mean it was a good day, though – 17 paramedics from the team were wounded and one was killed, and Dr. Loubani himself sustained a gunshot wound to the leg. Overall, 52 people were killed and 2,410 wounded on May 14th. 

The pain and violence happening in Gaza are ongoing, and no one can say how long the crisis will stretch on, or how many more lives will be lost. But because of brave and resourceful individuals like those working on the Glia Project, the number of lives lost is fewer than it would have been without them and their 3D printed medical tools.

“If you would like to participate in this project, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@glia.org. If you are more technically inclined, check out the tourniquet project’s Github page, where you can file issues or make pull requests,” Dr. Loubani concludes, as more help is always needed.

If anyone deserves the Order of Canada it is surely Dr. Tarek Loubani even if it does embarrass the government of the day.

If the Boot Fits, Wear It.

Israel didn't act alone yesterday when its snipers slaughtered 58 unarmed Gazan protesters and wounded another 1,300. Trump, being the truly vile snake that he is, blamed the killings and the mutilation on Hamas. After all, unarmed Palestinians must never protest within marksman range of the Israeli wire.

So there you've got Netanyahu and Trump, they're quite a pair. But, wait a second. Someone's missing. What about the Three Amigos? That would be Canada in right of its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Israel's other faithful ally.

What is Canada going to do about this seemingly endless murder of unarmed Palestinians? Apparently we're going to look the other way and ignore it.That's the Justin way. If he's really feeling the heat he'll probably call on both sides to stop murdering each other and sit down to negotiate or some steaming heap of horseshit along those lines.

If the boot fits, Justin, be man enough to wear it. It's not just Trump who is complicit in this.

Well, That's a Relief!

Israel has officially absolved itself of any wrongdoing in the murder of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach last summer.

The kids - they were children - had a soccer ball in play when an Israeli patrol boat opened fire on them with explosive shells. Unfortunately, for the Israelis, foreign journalists witnessed the slaughter.

The New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Tyler Hicks, who witnessed the incident, though from a different angle to the Guardian, wrote in a blog at the time: “A small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants, the Israel Defence Forces’ intended targets.

“Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, doesn’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either.” 

Oh well, it was only four kids and, besides, they were Palestinian kids, worse yet they were Gazans.  All three Canadian parties supported Israel's "Dahiyeh" campaign against Gaza that saw civilians butchered by the hundreds so what's four kids in the greater scheme of things?

And, yes, those are news photos of those kids (the three who survived the first round) running for safety just seconds before they too were killed.  

Shoot to Kill - Anyone, Everyone

Israeli soldiers willfully targeted civilians in last year's war on Gaza.

Testimonies provided by more than 60 Israeli soldiers who fought in last summer’s war in Gaza have raised serious questions over whether Israel’s tactics breached its obligations under international law to distinguish and protect civilians.

The claims – collected by the human rights group Breaking the Silence – are contained in dozens of interviews with Israeli combatants, as well as with soldiers who served in command centres and attack rooms, a quarter of them officers up to the rank of major.

They include allegations that Israeli ground troops were briefed to regard everything inside Gaza as a “threat” and they should “not spare ammo”, and that tanks fired randomly or for revenge on buildings without knowing whether they were legitimate military targets or contained civilians.

..Post-conflict briefings to soldiers suggest that the high death toll and destruction were treated as “achievements” by officers who judged the attrition would keep Gaza “quiet for five years”.

The Israeli campaign itself was one giant war crime.  It featured the now-standard Israeli tactic of Dahiyeh, the deliberate targeting of essential civilian infrastructure - water plants, sewage treatment plants, power utilities before moving on to hospitals, schools and finally residential neighbourhoods.  This is outrageously contrary to the laws of war and international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions.  

Yet the Liberal Party supports these atrocities, masking it under the guise of "self defence."  Let's not forget that Mulcair also was on side with this at first until he sensed that the wind had shifted and conveniently reversed himself.  

Netanyahu's "Dog Whistle" Might Have Fetched the Hounds

Maybe some day Benjamin Netanyahu will be known as the founder of the state of Palestine.  Strange things are happening.  From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Already the US is hinting that it might support a United Nations Security Council resolution that recognises Palestine along pre-1967 borders.

Until now it has repeatedly refused to endorse the resolution and Israel has always been opposed to it, insisting that only negotiations can bring about a lasting peace and agreed borders, but a US official has told The New York Times that Washington is "in a reality where the Israeli government no longer supports direct negotiations. Therefore we clearly have to factor that into our decisions".

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg described Mr Netanyahu's comments as "extremely worrying".

"It cannot be more alarming – to have [Mr Netanyahu] do something which no leading Israeli politician has ever done – to rule out the prospect of a two-state solution," he said.

Summing up the week in Israeli politics, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy said: "They voted for the man who admitted to having duped half the world during his Bar-Ilan speech. Now he has torn off his mask and disavowed those words once and for all. Israel said `yes' to the man who said `no' to a Palestinian state."

Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, "No one has been taking seriously the idea that you will get a two-state solution under Netanyahu, but if you can maintain the pretence, if the Palestinians are willing to maintain it, if the US and the EU are willing to maintain it, then it can be business as usual."

...The tactics Mr Netanyahu used to get elected – coming out against a Palestinian state – will have far-reaching consequences on Israel's standing in the international community, warns Daniel Seidemann, political commentator and an expert on Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.

"There are people who only recently have heard the opposite from him – US Secretary of State John Kerry, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example – and I believe that tactics that Netanyahu used to get re-elected will haunt us for a long time.

"Netanyahu plays on Israeli fears and anxieties the way the virtuoso plays on a Stradivarius," he says.

Is it even possible for the Americans or Euros to play this game again?  How will they respond to the continued annexation of Jerusalem, more illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories or the next time Israeli deathware is dispatched to "mow the lawn" in Gaza?

Update - Guess who's heading to Israel to congratulate Netanyahu?  John Boehner.

Israel- Palestine in One Paragraph

Yesterday we discussed the modern trend of policy divorced from reality.  One ugly example of that is the policy of Canada's government, and Trudeau's Conservative-Lites, lavishing absolute support on Israel in its persecution of the Palestinians.  Not to say that the NDP is much better.

If you're a Liberal, consider your party's policy against Noam Chomsky's summary of the cat and mouse game Israel is playing with the Palestinians.

It is critically important to recognize that a pattern was established almost a decade ago and has been followed regularly since: A ceasefire agreement is reached, Israel makes it clear that it will not observe it and continues its assault on Gaza (and illegal takeover of what it wants elsewhere in the occupied territories), while Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel concedes, until some Israeli escalation elicits a Hamas response, offering Israel a pretext for another episode of "mowing the lawn" (in Israel's elegant parlance). I have reviewed the record elsewhere; it is unusually clear for historical events. The same pattern holds for Operation Protective Edge. Another of the series of ceasefires had been reached in November 2012. Israel ignored it as usual, Hamas observed it nevertheless. In April 2014, Gaza-based Hamas and the Palestine Authority in the West Bank established a unity government, which at once adopted all of the demands of the Quartet (the US, EU, UN, Russia) and included no Hamas members. Israel was infuriated, and launched a brutal operation in the West Bank, extending to Gaza, targeting mainly Hamas. As always there was a pretext, but it quickly dissolves on inspection. Finally killings in Gaza elicited a Hamas response, followed by Protective Edge. The reasons for Israel's fury are not obscure. For 20 years, Israel has sought to separate Gaza from the West Bank, with full US support and in strict violation of the Oslo Accords that both had signed, which declare the two to be a single indivisible territorial entity. A look at the map explains the reasons. Gaza offers the only access for Palestine to the outside world; without free access to Gaza, any autonomy that might be granted to some fragmented Palestinian entity in the West Bank will be effectively imprisoned.

The Shooting May Have Stopped But, For Civilians, Gaza's Suffering Deepens.

For good and obvious reasons, destruction of essential civilian infrastructure such as water supply and sewage systems is prohibited by the laws of war.  Attacking such targets is a war crime.

For Israel, it's not just a war crime.  It's a strategy and it's called Dahiyeh. It's the deliberate targeting of civilians; their homes, schools and hospitals; and the water plants and sewage systems essential for public health and safety.

When Israel began waging Dahiyeh against Gaza Palestinians in July, it sent warplanes in to take down the water station and sewage plants.  Now a group of 30-humanitarian agencies banded together under the name EWASH (Emergency Water Sanitation and Health) warns that two-thirds of the Gazan population is running out of water and the besieged territory is at risk of outbreaks of water-borne diseases.

Israeli destruction of Gaza's sewage infrastructure has led to broken mains and open sewage flooding.

Hedges Invokes "God's Covenant" on Gaza

Chris Hedges spoke at a rally and march in support of Gaza in New York on Saturday.  A Harvard divinity school grad, he invoked God's Covenant.   Here are excerpts from his speech:

God’s covenant in the Promised Land was not made, finally, with any race or religion. It was not made with the Jews. It was not made with the Muslims. It was not made with the Christians. God’s covenant—in the Bible and the Koran—was made with the righteous. When Ibrahim asked in the holy Koran if the covenant could be inherited, he was told bluntly: “My covenant is not given to oppressors.” And God’s iron requirement to stand with the oppressed occurs as well in the Hebrew and Greek bibles. Those who turn away from righteousness—be they Jew, Christian or Muslim—violate that covenant. They are not God’s people.

God’s covenant is made with those who love mercy and do justice, with those who care for the stranger, the orphan and the widow, with those who frustrate the ways of the wicked, with those who bring good news to the oppressed, who bind up the brokenhearted, who proclaim liberty to the captives and release to all those in prison, including those imprisoned in Gaza. God’s covenant is with those men and women—Jews, Christians and Muslims, believers and nonbelievers—who say, “Let my people go, oppressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go.” And God calls these people oaks of righteousness. And they are God’s people.

Read more here.

While We're Focused on Chemical Warfare

It's interesting how selective the United States can be about weapons of mass destruction given that the U.S. continues to be responsible for widespread and ongoing death and destruction from its own chemical and nuclear weapons.

The gas that Obama-Kerry are blaming on Assad appears to have killed somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand or more Syrians.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the locals are left to live with the radiation hazard created by American depleted uranium (DU) shells and bullets.  D.U. is known to cause cancers, birth defects and stillbirths and D.U. contamination is believed to persist for decades, if not generations.  D.U. dust particles can be inhaled and then embed in the lungs.

And American chemical weapons are still killing in Vietnam and could be for centuries to come.   Agent Orange, generously air delivered as a defoliant, is estimated to remain lethally effective for up to six centuries.  It gets in the soil and in the ground water.  It too causes cancers, birth defects and stillbirths.  Hang in there, Vietnam, only 500 years to go.

Where was our righteous indignation and call to arms when Israel blasted Gazans with white phosphorus rounds and bombs?  The Liberal leader of the day absolved Israel for that and one of his former aides now demands that Syria be attacked.

How do we explain our indifference to the cluster bomblets that litter southern Lebanon, taking lives almost daily, that were fired into that area by Israel in the hours prior to ceasefire?

This is not an apology for Assad.  He's a brutal, murderous shit in a region full of brutal, murderous shits, among them a number we consider friends.  This is about us and it's about our hypocrisy that undermines any credibility we have in denouncing Assad and calling for strikes against Syria.

When do the Vietnamese, the Iraqis or the Afghans get to retaliate against the Americans for the use of WMDs against them in their homelands?

Netanyahu Steps In His Own Mess

Benjamin Netanyahu, with a looming date with Israeli voters, is doing his best to portray himself as the victor in Israel's 8-day, Operation Pillar of Defence but, in the minds of many Israelis, he's actually the loser.  Der Spiegel reports that a good many people, inside Israel and elsewhere, see the winners as Hamas and Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

"...the Israeli press is not joining Netanyahu in praising Netanyahu. To be sure, most analysts agree that the current ceasefire bringing the Israeli Gaza operation "Pillar of Defense" to a halt is a positive development due to the return of calm to southern Israel. But in the Israeli press, Netanyahu's name was not among the victors listed on Thursday morning. Rather, leading commentators in the country agree that the primary beneficiaries from the week-long clash are the Hamas leadership and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who negotiated the truce.

"A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi's summertime election had led to significant distrust in the West. Now, writes Anshel Pfeffer in the influential Israeli daily Haaretz, the crisis has propelled Mursi into the role of an important regional statesman. The proof: As the ceasefire was being finalized this week, US President Barack Obama telephoned with Morsi multiple times.
 
"Pfeffer emphasized that even Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman saw it necessary to thank Morsi for his role in bringing about a truce. Given Lieberman's hard-line stance, such a move counts as a mini-sensation in Israel. After all, the Israeli foreign minister is hardly a fan of Egypt or Hamas, having in the past called for the bombardment of the Aswan Dam and demanded that the Gaza Strip be treated as the Russians do Chechnya.

"Hamas too has managed to extract minor victories from the conflict, according to analysts. For one, the Islamist leaders of the Gaza Strip inserted a clause in the ceasefire agreement which calls for at least a partial lifting of the blockade Israel imposed on the Palestinian area after Hamas came to power in 2006. Furthermore, the fact that the Hamas leadership didn't collapse in the face of heavy bombardment, along with the fact that their rockets continued to rain down on Israel throughout the conflict, has been interpreted as a success.

"But even more important for the Islamists, according to Haaretz, is that their rockets were able to hit both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And they were able to position themselves as a negotiating partner for the Israeli leadership, guaranteeing them a role as an actor in the Middle East for at least the immediate future.

"...Simon Shiffer, the veteran writer for Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, writes that Hamas has now become the most influential Palestinian power because Netanyahu has undertaken negotiations with them while ignoring the Palestinian Authority and its President Mahmoud Abbas."

All of which raises the question of how much damage Netanyahu has done to his and Israel's influence in Washington.   After all, Bibi did everything but stuff ballot boxes for Mitt Romney and yet utterly failed to deliver the American Jewish vote to the Republicans.  Now his second act was a complete blunder in Gaza.  Anyone think America is keen to support Netanyahu attacking Iran?

Gaza To Secede?

Think Pakistan and the independence of Bangladesh.   Now think Palestinian Authority/West Bank and Hamas/Gaza splitting up.  This little jaw dropper seems to be in the works with Hamas, a charter branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, looking to link up with big brother Egypt, itself now with  Muslim Brotherhood leadership.   In effect, Gaza would be severing all ties with both Israel and the rest of the Palestinian territories.

Hamas may be contemplating... ...cutting its financial ties to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, in preparations for declaring full independence on behalf of Gaza.

Al-Hayat first reported the story on July 22. The London-based Arabic daily noted that Hamas was poised to sever its limited economic ties with Israel, open a free trade zone with Egypt at the Rafah border crossing, and declare itself liberated. Before the story could gain traction, however, senior Hamas leaders Mahmoud al-Zahhar and Salah al-Bardawil quickly disavowed the reports.

But senior Gazan officials quietly acknowledged to me in recent meetings that Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group, and President Mohamed Morsi’s new Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, are actively discussing this controversial idea. Hamas has approached the question patiently since conquering the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in 2007. Now, after a half decade of economic hardship resulting from the Gaza embargo, the Hamas government appears to believe that 1.7 million Gazans would welcome the free flow of goods above nearly all else.

...Egyptians are particularly ambivalent. In April, Palestine Press quoted an Egyptian official who opposed the move because it would “cause great harm to the Palestinian cause.” 

...Egypt is also deeply reluctant to let Israel off the hook. As long as Israel controls Gaza’s borders, airspace and coastal waters, it is seen as the occupying power. 

Speculative and radical as this sounds, Gaza is a territory and a people facing existential challenges in urgent need of solutions.  A United Nations report found that without great improvements in water, electricity, sanitation and health services, Gaza could be unlivable by 2020.   Something big has to happen - soon.

No Matter What You Call It, It's Still Ethnic Cleansing

The Gaza Strip, refuge for nearly 1.7-million Palestinians, will be uninhabitable by 2020.


"Action needs to be taken now if Gaza is to be a liveable place in 2020 and it is already difficult now," U.N. humanitarian coordinator Maxwell Gaylard told journalists when the report was released on Monday.

Five years into an Israeli blockade supported by Egypt, and living under one-party rule, Gaza's population of 1.6 million is set to rise by 500,000 over the next eight years, say the authors of the U.N.'s most wide-ranging report on the territory.

Gaza has one the youngest populations in the world, with 51 percent of people under the age of 18.

"Action needs to be taken right now on fundamental aspects of life: water sanitation, electricity, education, health and other aspects," Gaylard said.

..."Despite their best efforts the Palestinians in Gaza still need help," he said. "They are under blockade. They are under occupation and they need our help both politically and practically on the ground."

UN Finally Clears Willie Pete from Gaza

The United Nations Mine Action Team (UNMAT) in Gaza has just finished clearing out Israeli white phosphorus warheads left over from Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza a year and a half ago. From the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office:

“The most common unexploded ordnance [UXOs] found in Gaza are mortars, rockets, bombs, white phosphorus canisters and mines, such as M-15 anti-tank mines,” Sheila Black, UNMAT’s support specialist, told IRIN in Gaza City. For more than a year, UNMAT has assessed the contamination threat in Gaza’s 1,642, mostly residential, sites, Black said. Since the end of the Israeli operation, more than 44 casualties - including 10 deaths - were believed to be UXO-related.

UNMAT uncovered 355 UXOs, including 71 M-15 anti-tank mines and 63 fragments of white phosphorus, as well as 2,100 rounds of small-arms ammunition. Additional white phosphorus munitions were handed over by the local authorities.

White phosphorus reacts with oxygen and “once in contact with air, it burns very hot, very quickly and very deeply on any substance it touches, including the human body”, said Mark Russell, UNMAT’s operations officer. Commonly used in smoke, tracer and illumination munitions, it can also cause serious burns or death.

Out of Sight/Out of Mind - the Misery of Gaza

Canadian politicians, including our own global peace expert Ignatieff, don't hesitate to weigh in on Gaza so long as the place is getting pummeled by the Israeli military. The rest of the time, who cares?

Iggy backed the Israeli side during the last onslaught, pretty much absolving the Israelis in advance for the war crimes that ensued. Now there's a dedicated man of peace for you. Lest there be any doubt about Ignatieff's appalling lack of judgment, the United Nations has just released its report into the tragedy, finding that both the Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity to boot. From The New York Times:

The four-member mission, led by Justice Richard Goldstone, a widely respected South African judge, also concluded that neither Israel nor the Palestinian groups had carried out any “credible investigations” into the conduct of the war. If that did not change within six months, the United Nations Security Council should refer the situation to the International Criminal Court in the Hague for possible prosecution, the panel concluded.

“The prolonged situation of impunity has created a justice crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory that warrants action,” the members said in their 574-page report on the war, during which some 1,200 Palestinians were killed, including at least several hundred civilians, and 13 Israelis died, 10 soldiers and 3 civilians.

It's too bad that Iggy chose to ignore what Liberals have long known - that there are almost never any clean hands in these conflicts. But there are dirty hands in abundance.

Today's Gaza is undergoing something akin to a medieval siege. We've probably all seen the movies where the attackers surround the castle, cutting off food and water to the defenders inside until they surrender or die. Welcome to Gaza, 2009.

The Gazans too are surrounded, cut off - by Israel - and the siege is strangling the public's access to drinking water. From the United Nations Humanitarian Affairs office:

Unless urgent action is taken, the supply of water fit for human use in the Gaza Strip will be depleted in 5-10 years, according to the Gaza Coastal Municipal Water Utility (CMWU) and UN agencies working there. Only 5-10 percent of groundwater - the most important supply source for human use (domestic, agricultural and industrial) in Gaza - yields potable water, according to CMWU.

...The poor quality of groundwater is due to over-extraction from the aquifer and this has allowed seawater intrusion - hence the high salinity of Gaza’s groundwater. Much of it is unfit for human use.

Tap water in Gaza is known to be very salty and undrinkable. Poor groundwater quality can also be attributed to pollution from wastewater seepage and the infiltration of agricultural fertilizers, according to a World Bank report released in April.

The decrease in useable water reserves has also been linked to climatic changes, such as lower rainfall, which have slowed the recharge rate of the aquifer. Other factors are a rapid population growth and increasing suburban sprawl, leaving little space for rainwater catchment areas.

...“Unlike the West Bank, Gaza is ‘downstream’ of the portion of the aquifer that lies beneath Israel, with lateral groundwater flows coming from Israel into the Gaza portion of the aquifer,” Ghannam said. “The groundwater underneath Gaza is becoming limited due to Israel’s construction of trap wells [about 27 wells] inside Israel, along Gaza’s eastern political border, siphoning water supplies from the aquifer before they reach Gaza.”

According to the Israeli Water Authority, the Gaza aquifer has no impact on Israel and Israel does not prevent the flow of surface water or groundwater to the Gaza aquifer. Blockade Since 2005, Gaza’s water supply has also been affected by restricted access to power, fuel and spare parts, the World Bank said.

Equipment and supplies needed for the construction, maintenance and operation of water and sanitation facilities have been denied entry to Gaza under the more that two-year Israeli blockade of the enclave, tightened after Hamas seized power in June 2007. Israel says that for security reasons it cannot allow certain materials into Gaza.

Gaza’s wastewater infrastructure, which provides partial and intermittent water treatment, is also in desperate need of repair. Most sewage goes raw to lagoons and the sea, or seeps through the soil and reaches the aquifer, according to the World Bank report.

Of course a lot of these claims come from that known terrorist sympathizer, the World Bank. It's incredible. We sit mute while Israel maintains the siege of Gaza and then condemn the Gazans if they retaliate with a handful of hapless rockets.

A Case to Answer

The Guardian has reported on a 3-week investigation into war crimes during the assault on Gaza. It would be rash to conclude, based on the reporters' accounts, that Israel committed the alleged crimes and the Israeli military flatly denies each and every allegation. However these reports don't stand alone. They're also corroborated by reports coming in from the United Nations, the Red Cross and numerous humanitarian organizations. Worse yet, they're consistent with statements now coming out from Israeli soldiers who took part in the attacks.

These accounts, from such diverse sources - Palestinian, Israeli and neutral - warrant a formal investigation or inquiry. Unfortunately that would have to be ordered by the UN Security Council and subject to veto by the United States.

Will the Canadian government call for such an investigation? Will the leader of the Official Opposition? What do you think? I think they would like to pretend this never happened.

Read the story and watch the three video reports here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian

Hey Iggy, You Backed THIS

I began having grave doubts about Michael Ignatieff's fitness to lead the Liberal Party when he gave his unequivocal endorsement of Israel's attack on Gaza. It was neither balanced nor nuanced and seemed calculated to appeal to a certain voting demographic at home at the cost of abandoning traditional Liberal even-handedness. Ignatieff essentially absolved Israel of blame for its actions in Gaza.

The problem with Iggy's reckless absolutism on the Israeli war on Gaza is getting tainted with the unfortunate aftermath, being stuck with having endorsed what were, in reality, war crimes. From the Associated Press:

JERUSALEM (AP) — An increasingly disturbing picture of the Israeli army's conduct in the Gaza war emerged Friday, as new witness accounts from Israeli troops described wanton vandalism to Palestinian homes, humiliation of civilians and loose rules of engagement that resulted in unnecessary civilian deaths.

The revelations of soldier conduct over the past two days have set off soul-searching and alarm in a country where the military is widely revered. They also have echoed Palestinian allegations that Israel's assault did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, at a time when some international human rights groups contend Israel violated the laws of war.

...The Israeli government has insisted it did all it could to prevent civilian casualties, but on Thursday, the army ordered a criminal inquiry into its own soldiers' reports that some troops killed civilians, including children, by hastily opening fire, confident that the relaxed rules of engagement would protect them.

The inquiry was based on postwar testimony from a gathering of soldiers involved in the offensive, published in a military institute's newsletter and leaked to two Israeli newspapers. The Haaretz daily published additional details Friday, and the transcript of the session was obtained by The Associated Press.

...Another soldier, Ram, described what appeared to be a rift between secular and religious soldiers.

"What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of an almost religious mission," he said. He described a "huge gap" between background material provided by the army's education corps, and religious material distributed by the army's rabbinate.

"Their message was very clear: 'We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,'" he said.

Read the entire report here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD97204S80

This is the reality Michael Ignatieff finds politically expedient to ignore. I honestly don't see how that sort of person is fit to lead the Liberal Party of Canada.

Gaza, Afghanistan & Iraq - The Same Old Story

What does Israel's failed war in Gaza have to do with the West's war in Afghanistan and the American misadventure in Iraq? All of these conflicts illustrate how readily overwhelming military superiority can be undermined by bad political leadership.

Not one of these wars had the critical political deliberation required before they were launched. That meant that only the simplest military objectives could be achieved - the immediate, tactical victories - while the meaningful objectives, the political and strategic purposes languished, obscure and ill-defined.

The old adage holds that war is simply an extension of politics when diplomacy fails. War is the application of state violence to achieve a political outcome. We can quibble over the fine points of these definitions but they're essentially true.

All other things being equal, good political leadership can win wars while bad political leadership can lose wars. We have more than two millenia of recorded history demonstrating that.

In Afghanistan, Washington's focus was on exacting revenge for the 9/11 attacks. The goal was to drive the Taliban out of power, to destroy al-Qaeda and to decapitate its leadership. The tactical part was easy. American air power was all that was needed to tip the scales in favour of the Northern Alliance warlords whose rout of the Taliban outpaced the Pentagon's ability to keep up. The strategic goals of destroying al-Qaeda and killing its leadership turned into a dismal and, by all accounts, needless failure.

The Afghan war ought to have been conclusively decided by 2003. Its Achilles' Heel was bad political leadership from the White House. Instead of winning the winnable victory in Afghanistan, the Bush administration decided to shift military resources out of the Afghan theatre in preparation for a needless invasion and conquest of Iraq. Five years later, that fateful neglect continues to play out in the quagmire of today's Afghanistan with its corrupt government, flourishing drug trade and resurgent Taliban insurgency

The same bad political leadership that dropped the ball in Afghanistan perpetrated the disastrous, even negligent decision-making that turned into the Iraq debacle. On last night's Daily Show, the New York Times' David Sanger appeared promoting his book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power. Sanger's book is a 490-page inventory of the enormous mess Obama inherits resulting from the Bush/Cheney war of whim in Iraq. It details all the threats that were allowed to grow while America was stuck in and focused on Iraq.

The Iraq war suffered from such an enormous vacuum of political leadership that not one of the key, domestic problems that beset the new Iraqi state has been resolved. You have the Sadr/Mahdi versus Maliki/Badr Shiite struggle, the Shiite versus Sunni struggle, the Arab versus Kurd struggle and they're not going away by themselves.

Bad political leadership failed to foresee that both Shiite and Sunni would resist occupation, that Iraq wasn't ready for secular democracy, that Iran would be the real winner, that the Kurds wouldn't be complacent to American dictates, that the occupation would play straight into the hand of Islamist extremists including al-Qaeda. The US military was readily able to deliver a stunning tactical victory but was completely unprepared and ill-led to achieve a strategic win.

Look at it this way. The invasion launched a war to topple Saddam. That was supposed to be it. Saddam gone, American stooge government in. But the war to topple Saddam rapidly turned into a war against the Sunni resistance (Rumsfeld's "dead-enders") that morphed into a war against the Shiite militias and a Sunni/Shia civil war that evolved into a war against terrorists when al-Qaeda and other Islamists beganto arrive for the party. Not one of these follow-on wars was foreseen by the political leadership and that's how what was to have been a 60-day conquest has turned into a 6-year disaster.

That war needed to be over by 2004 at the latest but that would have meant flooding Iraq with enough troops to stabilize the country for a handover to a viable central government.

Then we have the Gaza war led by that incompetent author of the Lebanon disaster, Ehud Olmert. Bad political leadership ensured that Israel had lost that war before the first tank rolled into the Gaza Strip.

The tactical victory was easy. Israeli troops, backed by artillery, tanks, attack helicopters and jet fighters, suffered extremely light casualties as they drove through Gaza pretty much at will. The problem was once they achieved the tactical objective, they had no strategic objective they could accomplish unless Hamas, its entire leadership and all of its fighters had been willing to make a suicide charge into the Israeli guns. And so, with the new guy showing up for work in Washington, the Israeli forces had no choice but to di di mau out of Gaza.

What did Israel accomplish from this folly? Sweet Fanny Adams, that's what. It undermined its Palestinian ally, Abbas and Fatah. It drew international sympathy to the suffering and hopeless plight of the Gazan Palestinians. It probably handed a dandy political victory to Hamas and certainly left it in control of Gaza.

If there is a lesson to this it's that we in the West can no longer afford this incompetence from our political leadership. No more unwinnable wars. No more wars on the cheap because quick & dirty doesn't work. We need to understand that even successful military campaigns can trigger blowback but when we wage unsuccessful wars that's a certainty.

Obama Might Have Palestine Figured Out

Hamas won't like it. Israel won't like it. That sure sounds like a way forward to me.

A rough idea of President Obama's initiative for peace in Palestine is emerging. The thrust of it seems to be to isolate Hamas in Gaza for now, clear the West Bank as a Palestinian homeland, create a vibrant economy and society in the West Bank and wait for the Gazans to sign on to a winning deal.

It will probably entail concessions from Israel, in particular clearing out all illegal settlements in the West Bank. The settler population is now estimated at upwards of 430,000, 40% of which arrived during the Bush Jr. administration

That will probably give the Israelis fits but, if there's to be any hope of lasting peace, that's pretty much unavoidable. Many Israeli papers have not warmly greeted the Obama inauguration. They seem to be getting the idea that the carte blanche thing is rapidly coming to a close.

Obama will have to tread carefully to resolve the Fatah-Hamas split. While Hamas was weakened by the Gaza war, many think Fatah suffered the greatest loss of Palestinian support. That may just create an opening for a genuine, national unity government for the Palestinian people.

Israel Admits It "May" Have Used White Phosphorus in Gaza

"May" have used? As though Israel doesn't keep a precise inventory on the number of white phosphorus weapons in its arsenal. Please.

The photo above from The Guardian shows an Israeli 155 mm. howitzer. The light green shells are Willie Pete or white phosphorus rounds.

From The Guardian:

Israel has admitted – after mounting pressure – that its troops may have used white phosphorus shells in contravention of international law, during its three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip.

One of the places most seriously affected by the use of white phosphorus was the main UN compound in Gaza City, which was hit by three shells on 15 January. The same munition was used in a strike on the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City the same day.

Just mentioning this is enough these days to get one branded an anti-Semite. So here's another way to look at it. Would you accept Canadian forces firing white phosphorus rounds into Afghan villages where they thought they'd spotted Taliban insurgents? Would you expect Canadian commanders who had used such terrible weapons on civilian areas to be punished? I know I sure as hell would but, then again, I don't think you would find a Canadian officer willing to fire white phosphorus into a residential area, much less at a United Nations compound.

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land

h/t ArtThreat.net for this one. The clip below is a preview of the documentary Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land by the Media Education Foundation. Because of the current war on Gaza, the MEF is making the entire documentary available, free of charge, online (you can also download it free). Check out the clip below. If you want to view or copy the whole documentary, go here:
http://www.pppl.org/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Savicom&utm_campaign=MEF%20Film%20Offered%20Free%20Online&utm_term=%0A&utm_content=elle-provocateur%40sympatico.ca