Credit: AP

In its May-June issue, the Columbia Journalism Review has published three perspectives on the media’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead, also known as the Gaza War. One of them is by your favourite Israeli blogger (that’d be me).

Taghreed El-Khodary is the Gaza correspondent for the New York Times. Her reporter’s notebook piece is called The Smell of Paradise: under pressure in Gaza.

Taghreed and I spoke jointly at a conference in Norway this past March. Here’s a photo I took of her on the last day in snowy Tonsberg, as we were waiting for our taxis to the airport.

J.J. Goldberg is the former editor of The Forward. He compares the British and American media’s coverage of Gaza in his piece, called A Matter of Trust.

(I’ve never met J.J., so I don’t have any photos of him).

My piece is about the Israeli media’s coverage of the war. It is called Covering Gaza from Israel: what Israelis wanted to know about the war. It starts like this:

“During the first week of Israel’s winter military operation in Gaza, a broadcaster for Channel 2, which has the highest rating of Israel’s three television stations, sparked a small firestorm by expressing what was perceived as excessive sympathy for the enemy. Summarizing a report during the evening news, anchorwoman Yonit Levy said, “It’s hard to convince the world that the war is justified when we have one person dead and the Palestinian nation has 350 dead.” Channel 2 was soon inundated with letters of complaint and came under fire online, where somebody set up an Internet petition to have Levy fired. Several of Levy’s colleagues, horrified by what one called a ‘lynch,’ came publicly to her support.

In the end the controversy was short-lived: Levy continues to anchor the Channel 2 news broadcast, which maintains its high ratings, and she remains Israel’s most popular news anchor. But the reaction to her statement is interesting as a demonstration of the solid public support—polled at more than 90 percent—for the twenty-two-day military operation, which finished with around 1,200 to 1,400 Palestinians killed and 11 Israelis, including 3 civilians. It also suggests what kind of wartime coverage the Israeli public wanted from its media.”

Click here to read the rest. You can comment on the CJR site – or, come back here to speak your mind.

Protesters demonstrate against the BBC in London. Credit: Frantzesco Kangaris/Agence France-Presse

A reader who works for the BBC wrote to ask if I planned to post about her employers’ decision against broadcasting a fund raising appeal for Gaza. The Beeb based its decision on the concern that broadcasting the appeal while the story was ongoing would give the impression of bias. John Burns of the New York Times summarizes the ensuing controversy here.

Anyway, I responded to this reader’s query by observing that I hadn’t really been following the controversy very closely, even though I knew it was a huge story in the UK. Privately, I thought it sounded shrill, polarizing and unnecessary. And even more privately I thought, “Eh, the Brits are so eccentric. After all, they eat yeast paste on white bread for breakfast. Eechs. And besides that, imagine thousands marching on the streets of London if the Beeb refused to broadcast a fundraiser for East Timor, Congo or Sri Lanka. Ha!”

So I suggested that this reader might be interested in writing a guest post for this blog. Below is her response, which I am publishing with permission. The reader’s name is witheld for obvious reasons.

Oh, two more things: Sky news also decided against broadcasting the appeal; and in the end, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) raised GBP 3 million – even though the money might never actually end up helping the people of Gaza.

***

Hi Lisa

Truth be told, I’m reluctant to write about it because: (a) I do not proclaim to be a writer – nor a decent one at that and (b) although I understand the decision not to air the appeal and, to a degree, stand by the decision, I’m still unsure whether or not it was the right decision in the long run. The argument that the Director General puts forth is that it’s a continuing news story and by broadcasting an emotional appeal on a news channel with harrowing images, it might appear that the BBC was “taking sides”. In addition, management was not convinced that the funds raised would reach the victims and those in need. And yet, by not broadcasting it, the BBC has been denounced as pro-Israel/ anti-Palestine and taking sides.

Just as a side note: this isn’t the first time that an appeal was rejected by the BBC. In 2006, the BBC rejected an appeal for East Africa, again, because they weren’t certain that the funds would reach the victims.

I don’t mean to sound like a PR piece for the BBC and as I said, although I understand the decision I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that it is the right one.

What does piss me off, however, is that this tragic war and the BBC’s refusal (as well as Sky’s refusal) to air the appeal, seems to have been hijacked by and turned into yet another example of how evil they perceive Israel to be. Or how “powerful Jews” lobby and influence broadcasters. Every day, I am emailed viewer’s comments about our programmes and recently, I’m particularly astonished at people objecting to a presenter on a children’s show (“Blue Peter“), who is rediscovering his Jewish roots. The comments are too depressing to reiterate.

I should probably note that I’m not Jewish (or Christian- never even been baptized!) but rather, just another person who wants peace in the Middle East.

Also, perhaps it’s my Canadian upbringing (and thus hyper sense of political correctness), but I am regularly shocked at how anti-Israel (anti-Jewish? I don’t know), Europe and Europeans can be. Not anti-Olmert/current politicians – but out and out ANTI-ISRAEL. And even though I identify as someone who is left-wing, I always seem to find myself isolated when it comes to that old debate that everyone and their dog has an opinion about  – i.e. Israel’s right to exist.

Sorry to have gone on about this, I guess I’m just tired of walking past the protests outside my work and having “shame” screamed at me for something out with my control. It’s been cathartic though!

Against a dramatic black background, the cover of last week’s Time Out Tel Aviv shows a white dove marked as though viewed through a sniper’s rifle. The caption has two meanings. It could be “say goodbye nicely,” which is how one instructs a small child to bid farewell. Or it could be “say peace is lovely.”  Combine the two, and you get “say goodbye nicely to peace”; or, in more sophisticated English, “bid peace a fond farewell.” The sub heading is, “Tel Aviv between Gaza and Sderot.”

According to the polls, 90 percent of Israelis support the Gaza campaign. I find that number quite worrying: public debate and a diversity of opinion are, as Ohad notes in this post, essential characteristics of a healthy democracy; and anyone who has expressed even the mildest anti-war sentiment can testify to the intimidating responses that have, I noticed, cowed many people into silence.

The intimidation ranges from verbal violence (“traitor!” “fifth columnist”) to the threat of being fired from one’s job – as in the case of Channel 2 anchor Yonit Levi. One friend even received death threats – via Facebook, if you can believe it. Assuming, though, that all the people polled about the war know that the Israeli media’s reporting has been controlled by the army spokesman’s iron fist; and assuming that everyone polled is both well-informed about what is really going on in Gaza and unafraid to voice an opinion that deviates from what we are constantly told is the mainstream, that still leaves one person out of 10 opposing the war. In this edition, Time Out Tel Aviv gives them a voice. Below are some translated excerpts.

In a weekly column titled “Reality,” (p.10) Amir Ben-David parodies the wildly popular Big Brother reality TV show that ended last month. (I blogged about his friendship with the editor of of Time Out Beirut during the Second Lebanon War). The hosts of the show were Erez Tal and Assi Ezer. Excerpt:

Erez Tal: And once again we join you, with a show that will have you on the edges of your seat. It’s called “the big boom.” Yes – tonight we have eliminations (from the show). Tension is high. Nerves are frayed. Everyone is biting his nails, especially the handsome young man standing here next to me. Good evening, Assi Ezer.

Assi Ezer: Good evening, Erez. Or, as I prefer to call you, Erez Crossing…

Erez: Ha, ha. Very funny.

Assi: I couldn’t resist. Yes, as you said, tonight is a big night. Everyone is sending SMS’s like crazy, but only one candidate will be eliminated at the end of this evening. Only you, the viewers, will decide who that will be. The lines are open and the decision is all yours.

Erez: Remind us, Assi, who are the candidates for elimination tonight?

Assi: With pleasure. Can you smell the smoke? Three are turning on the rotisserie tonight – Jabalyah, Dir El Balah and Nusseirat Refugee Camp. Our brave air force pilots are already sitting in their fighter planes. The tension in the offices of the higher command is at its peak, and only our viewers, who are SMSing now, are the ones that will decide who the pilots eliminate from the face of the earth by the end of this evening.

Erez: Just like that? They’ll eliminate them? Erase them completely?

Assi: Completely! We won’t leave a single stone untouched.

Erez: Children? Women? Old people?

Assi: All of them!

****

On page 28, editor Itai Waldman’s column is about the despair engendered by the increasing frequency of wars in this region, and the sense that a normal life is ever more elusive. Excerpt:

“You sit on the sofa watching TV and you see the parade of politicians, ministers and generals, and all sorts of people that they find in the attic whenever there’s a war, because they wore a rank on their epaulets so they must know something about something, and everyone analyzes the event, and then we go to our correspondent in Sderot who interviews people where a rocket just fell that very second, and you listen to it all, and you simply refuse to believe that it’s happening again. Because the most frustrating thing about wars is that they never ask you. You’re living your life, in the center of Tel Aviv as it happens, trying to be a good citizen and just go with the flow from age 0 to 80, and to have a nice life, without hurting anyone and without being hurt by anyone else, and every few years, one fine morning, they drop a war on you. And you feel like shouting, ‘Hello?! Could we do this some other day? Because it really doesn’t work for me today; I had other plans. Like living, for example.’

But you can shout until tomorrow, because no-one is listening, and no-one really cares. Not in the places where they make decisions, at least. And you think it could be otherwise, and it could even be that you have some good advice up your sleeve, but with the cacophony of words coming at you from every direction you’re pretty sure that no-one will listen to you, and besides, how much does it really matter?

And then the IDF goes into Gaza, and by the end of the day the generals summarize the first day of the ground operation and say that it was a fantastic day and that we achieved all our goals (‘what goals?’ you wonder naively to yourself), and sometime during the news broadcast, quietly and without moving his lips too much, the anchor announces that one of our soldiers was killed. And the subtext is that one dead in nine days is really nothing and we can be happy and go to sleep with smiles on our faces because the operation is succeeding and everything is fine, but it’s 1 a.m. and you’re very cold and you can’t fall asleep so that probably means that nothing is fine.

And all you can think about is that poor boy who last week was hanging out with his friends at the mall, and after that he went to see a movie with his girlfriend, and then they went back to his place, and they made love the way you do when you’re 18, quietly, because you still live at home and your parents are sleeping in the next room. And in the morning they get up together, and he goes to the army and they make plans to meet when he gets his next furlough, in another two weeks, and until then they will speak on the phone, ‘I’ll SMS you when I’m back at the base, so you’ll know I’m okay.’ And then the war starts, and they tell him he is going into Gaza, and she is worried, and he tries to calm her down, and she won’t be calmed, and he has to hang up, and she’s alive, and he’s dead.”

—–

“And now you’re frustrated. And your frustration is so big that you can uproot mountains and make buildings collapse. Frustrated, you watch the news hosted by Raviv Druker and Ofer Shelach, whom you usually like a lot, as they talk with some general from the reserves, and they start with that fascist mumbo jumbo, and Shelach says that the best way to fight in a heavily built-up area is to blow up the whole neighbourhood first and then to fight in an open area, and they laugh, they really, really laugh, and you think ‘How can you laugh? How are you able to laugh?’, and you feel as though you’ll never want to laugh again.

Wars have a certain cumulative quality. When you’re a kid and they bomb you, and your dad takes you in his arms and runs to the shelter, the whole situation is infused with a sort of weird childhood magic. And when you’re in the army and you enter a battle with your unit, you’re so brainwashed that it doesn’t really touch you. And you can even survive your first war as an adult civilian. But one day the moment comes when you just collapse.

And that’s what you feel is happening right now. That you don’t understand what they want from you. That you don’t understand why now. That everything looks so capricious, illogical, unfair. And you’re sad for everyone – the people of Gaza, the people of southern Israel, who didn’t do anything bad to anyone either, but mostly for yourself. You’re sad for yourself because you don’t want to to spend the rest of your life like this – from bombing to bombing, from injustice to injustice, from death to death. You’re sad for yourself because life has taught you that you only have yourself. And the only people you thought maybe you’re not sad about are the politicians, but then you give that a bit more thought, and you’re sad for them too. They’re so contemptible, so impotent, that it would be disgusting on your part not to feel grief for them.

War is something huge. Enormous. And you can look at it from so many different angles. You can talk about the causal factors, and you can talk about the disengagement from Gaza; you can try to understand if this is calculated as an election strategy, and you can talk about the crisis within the political left; you can talk about the wartime induction of the media, and you can talk about pathetic celebrities, that go to perform in the bomb shelters in a cynical attempt to revive their careers. But talking about all that will just make the war continue. And that is why the only subject worthy of discussion in wartime is the people who are dying. The newspapers should be filled with lines upon lines with the names of the dead, and who they were, and what they did, and what they wanted to do tomorrow morning but will never do. People who planned to live here with us, today, and to breathe the air that I breathe now when I write this text, and the air that you breathe when you read this text, and the only thing that touches their cold nostrils right now, is ash.”

*****

On page 30, Elinor Davidov writes about  a 40-episode television documentary called Gaza-Sderot, Life in Spite of Everything. Each episode features an interview with an ordinary person on either side of the border, describing daily life. The result is a fascinating combination of drama and banality that makes the series well worth watching. It was co-produced by a staff from Sderot’s Sapir College, Gaza’s Ramattan Studios and the German-French arte.tv (photos and bio blurbs are here). On page 31, there is a sidebar: it reproduces a sad and desperate IM chat that took place between one of the Israeli producers and a Gazan producer shortly after the windows on the latter’s house were blown out by a bomb that fell on the house next door.

Hadash MK Dov Khenin wrote a long opinion piece that starts on page 35. I’m running out of time for translating, so I’ll just do the introduction:

“And of course it would never occur to anyone to think that this military operation has actually made life worse for the residents of the western Negev. After all, it’s ‘our right and even our obligation’ to protection civilians. Everything is buried under the rhetoric that deals with the most immediate response – they’re shooting at you, thus you are permitted to shoot back, and you are even permitted to go a little crazy and shoot at everything that is in your way. Is it wise to shoot? Are there other ways to stop them from shooting at you? Not now. We’re shooting now.”

Page 37 has a sidebar that describes the Israeli media’s total silence about the anti-war march I blogged about last week. According to the item, 15,000 people participated in that demonstration. Each of the major media outlets offers an official explanation as to why they ignored the story.

A series of snapshots – mini-interviews, slices of life – from southern Israel are spread out over pages 38-41.

And there you have it – voices from amongst the 10 percent.

The following letter was published yesterday in the Observer.

To the government of Israel

We are writing this letter as profound and passionate supporters of Israel. We look upon the increasing loss of life on both sides of the Gaza conflict with horror. We have no doubt that rocket attacks into southern Israel, by Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups, are war crimes against Israel. No sovereign state should, or would, tolerate continued attacks and the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Israel had a right to respond and we support the Israeli government’s decision to make stopping the rocket attacks an urgent priority.

However, we believe that only negotiations can secure long-term security for Israel and the region.

We are concerned that rather than bringing security to Israel, a continued military offensive could strengthen extremists, destabilise the region and exacerbate tensions inside Israel with its one million Arab citizens. The offensive and the mounting civilian victims – like the Lebanon war in 2006 – also threaten to undermine international support for Israel.

We stand alongside the people of Israel and urge the government of Israel and the Palestinian people, with the assistance of the international community, to negotiate:

• An immediate and permanent ceasefire entailing an end to all rocket attacks and the complete and permanent lifting of the blockade of Gaza.

• International monitoring of the ceasefire agreement, including measures to ensure the security of the borders between Israel and Gaza as well as the prevention of weapons smuggling into Gaza.

It is our desire to see a durable solution for ordinary people and our view that an immediate ceasefire is not only a humanitarian necessity but also a strategic priority for the future security of Israelis, Palestinians and people of the region.
Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield
Sir Jeremy Beecham
Professor David Cesarani
Professor Shalom Lappin
Michael Mitzman
Baroness Julia Neuberger
Rabbi Danny Rich
Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein
Rabbi Dr Michael Shire
Sir Sigmund Sternberg
Paul Usiskin

Thank you, Norm.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has three Israeli sisters. They live in a Bedouin town near Beer Sheva, which is within range of Hamas’s rockets. Back in the 1980s, when a Palestinian from the occupied territories could become a citizen by marriage, the sisters were married off to Israeli Bedouin. They are widows now, but they still live in the village with their grown children. Some of their neighbours – also Bedouin – served in the Israel army. In a January 4 interview with Yedioth Aharonoth’s Nir Gontarz, the sisters expressed fear of the incoming Hamas rockets and worry for their brother Ismail – who is hiding in a bunker somewhere in Gaza. They called upon both Israel and Hamas to cease firing. “Hamas must stop firing rockets at Beer Sheva, but so must Israel stop attacking Gaza. If our children are afraid, then it must be very difficult for the children in Gaza,” said 59 year-old Khaldia Abu Rakik.

Kids playing in Gaza, September 2005

Last week I called Gaza, which has the same local dialing code as Sderot, to check on my friend “Musa,” a journalist in Gaza who regularly files reports for Israeli media (all the Israeli media have local correspondents in Gaza). Speaking in his still-fluent Hebrew, he insisted that he was fine – working hard, busy all day, no time to think. “And your children?” I asked. “Well, my 6 year-old daughter lost the ability to walk – it’s a symptom of trauma – so she spends all her time in bed. We only have electricity for a couple of hours a day and school is canceled, so the other kids have to sit around in the dark doing nothing all day. We can’t let them play outside because of the bombings. Anyway, they are too afraid to go out. There isn’t any water, because you need electricity to pump it. We have enough food, although my wife could not find bread yesterday. She said there were about 200 people queued up at the bakery. It’s cold and we don’t have heat, but we have to leave the windows open so they won’t shatter from the booms. But I am fine. You haven’t told me about yourself! How are you?” Musa was always like that – overdoing the stiff upper lip, even when circumstances would justify some complaining.

Suddenly there was a lot of static on the phone line and we had to shout. “Can you hear me?!” we called out to one another. “Musa, I…” BOOM. The static cleared. Musa’s children were shouting in the background. “That one was very close,” he said calmly.  Just before we ended the conversation Musa said, “You know I don’t support Hamas. You know that. So just tell me… do Israelis know what is happening to us here?”

Not really, I told him uneasily. Israeli television is more focused on how the war affects us. We see very little of the images from Gaza.

That conversation took place before the IDF’s ground incursion began, and before the air force bombed the central power plant. Since we spoke, the number of casualties in Gaza has more than doubled. And there is no electricity at all.

Nor is life terribly pleasant for children living in the Sderot/western Negev area these days. Then again, it’s been pretty bad for the past 8 years – with Qassams falling several times per day and sirens and safe rooms a part of life. No-one could figure out how to stop the Qassams, but the people of Sderot thought that the government was not really trying – that they were indifferent to the suffering of Mizrachim living on the country’s periphery. “Do something!” they cried out to the government, as elections approached and Bibi Netanyahu seemed positioned to win.

So Ehud Barak, the defense minister and leader of the Labor party, which before the war had a very low popularity rating indeed, decided to do something. A couple of days after Hamas fired 88 rockets in one day at Sderot and the surrounding communities, the air force attacked Gaza and killed 200 Palestinians in one morning.

It may be true that sometimes you have to crack some eggs in order to make an omelette. Unfortunately, however, the campaign against Hamas, now entering its twelfth day, has not stopped the jihadists. They may be hungry, cold and dirty, but fanaticism is a mighty motivator. They are still launching rockets at Israel all day long. Several Israeli military correspondents have explained that it might not be possible for the IDF to wipe out Hamas’s military wing.

Writing on his blog, Channel 10’s political analyst Raviv Drucker outlines the reasons why the IDF campaign is unlikely to deliver on the government’s promise to stop the Qassams. Journalist Danny Rubinstein, a noted Middle East expert who speaks fluent Arabic, thinks the military operation in Gaza is just going to make Hamas more powerful and more popular.

Which is probably why the Hamas leadership, holed up in cozy bunkers, thinks it’s a good strategy to keep launching rockets at Israel while the people of Gaza sit in the dark, terrified, freezing and hungry, not knowing when the next bomb or tank shell will come and where it will land, with nowhere to run and no way to protect their children. Indeed, some Hamas militants took time off from their heroic battle against the Zionist enemy to visit Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where they summarily executed wounded Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel – with a bullet to the brain. Sorry for the gore – I just wanted to make a point, in case you are one of those western fake leftists (a.k.a. anti-democratic reactionaries) who might be marching in London, waving banners emblazoned with the idiotic slogan “We are all Hamas now.” If you are one of those people, you might be interested in knowing that the Hamas leadership has completely buggered off, leaving ordinary people to fend for themselves without any infrastructure – no phones, no banks, no post office, no schools, etc. So much for the “resistance.” So go ahead, I am with you all the way on the calls for a ceasefire. But please, spare me the apologia for a fascist, theocratic, thuggish movement.

Not only are the Hamas leaders not suffering, but they must be figuring they’re about to come out of this campaign way ahead.  Thousands of Arabs are demonstrating on their behalf, enraged at their own leaders for failing to help the people of Gaza. I imagine that a certain turbaned gentleman living in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan is rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of pro-west Arab rulers having to deal with popular protests that threaten to destabilize their governments. Saves him having to recruit more suicide bombers, doesn’t it?

More strange tales from the Middle East. On Saturday night, I attended an anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv that attracted thousands of Israelis from all over the country. You can read English language Israeli bloggers’ reports about that demo, and view their photos, here, here, here and here.

Below is a clip that I shot with my digital camera (the fabulous Mr. Idan Gazit put in the subtitles). As you will see, the turnout was pretty high – organizers estimate 10,000; I don’t know about that, but I can say that there was a solid mass of people stretching from Rabin Square to the Cinematheque (maybe 500 meters?).

Anti war demonstration in Tel Aviv from Lisa Goldman on Vimeo.

And yet, to the astonishment of everyone I know who was at that demonstration (which included former combat soldiers and those who identify firmly with the Zionist left) the Israeli media either ignored it, buried it or dismissed it. Israeli journalist Itamar Shaaltiel, who also participated in the demo, has more details in this Hebrew blog post. Israeli media reports under-estimated the number of protesters and inflated the number of counter-demonstrators from a maximum of a few hundred, to several thousand. In fact – and to my chagrin – the only accurate and neutrally worded report I found is on Al Jazeera’s English website.

That article briefly undermined my AJ hate-on -but it was quickly revived when I saw an execrable interview  from the Washington studio: guest journalist Marwan Bishara explained to his enthusiastically receptive hosts that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Indeed, explained Marwan, Hamas has committed to ending its violence against Israel as soon as the occupation ends. Awesome, Marwan. Could we have a source for that astonishingly mendacious statement, please? I suppose Marwan wasn’t thinking of Nizar Rayyan, the number three Hamas leader and all-round freak who dispatched his own son to commit a suicide bombing and masterminded several more. Haniyeh just said that his death was “a painful loss” (the IAF killed him a few days ago, along with his wives, 12 of his children and some of the neighbours’ children as well). I did not receive the memo about Rayyan having disavowed the Hamas charter, although I do question the ethics of the “collateral deaths” involved in his assassination.

Standing in clusters along the route of Saturday’s anti-war protest march, wrapped in Israeli flags, there were a few small groups of hecklers who sneered, “intellectuals!”, “bleeding hearts!”, “traitors!”, “terrorists!” and “go live in Gaza!” I started filming the guys in the clip below when they suddenly began to pump their fists and jump up and down like soccer hooligans as they chanted, “death to Arabs!” (MAH-vet l’ah-rah-VEEM! MAH-vet l’ah-rah-VEEM!). It was almost a pity that they stopped as soon as I pointed my camera at them. But I caught them yelling “bogdim!” (traitors) and singing an, um, “interesting” version of the national anthem they purport to cherish. The guy on the left is brandishing a flyer that shows a picture of MK Avigdor Lieberman, who is often parodied for his far-right (some say fascist) views.

Right wing counter-demonstrators to the anti-war protestors from Lisa Goldman on Vimeo.

Here’s the part that seems perfectly normal in Israel, and probably perfectly strange to foreign observers: The Border Police who impassively and non-violently formed a human barrier between the anti-war demonstrators and the racist counter-demonstrators were mostly Druze Arabs. Yup, true. Arab citizens of Israel protected the right of a bunch of thugs to yell racist epithets.

Meanwhile, Yudit reports that some anti-war activists (Palestinian-Israelis) were interrogated by the police and put under house arrest in Jaffa, on suspicion of incitement to terror and non-recognition of the state. One of the activists under house arrest is Omar Sikseck, a member of the Tel Aviv municipal council. I wonder how he can be accused of not recognizing the state, since he is an elected participant in one of its institutions. Haaretz has more on police intimidation of Israeli citizens who oppose the war.

And as long as we’re on the subject of Palestinian-Israelis, let’s talk about how the war against Gaza is affecting them. Documentary director Ibtisam Maraana, whose prize-winning films include Paradise Lost, Three Times Divorced and Lady Kul el Arab, dropped her candidacy from the Meretz list in the upcoming election because the left-Zionist party supported the military action in Gaza. Meretz has since changed its position, but for Ibtisam it was too little, too late. As she wrote in response to my message on her Facebook profile, “…I could not lend a hand to Barak and his campaign of killing and terror, which will fall upon the people of both Gaza and Sderot.” Ibtisam speaks fluent Hebrew, lives in Tel Aviv and socializes easily with both Jews and Arabs. A firm believer in co-existence between Arabs and Jews, she has represented Israel at prestigious international documentary film festivals. For many Jews, however, her stance against the war was a matter of indifference (“number 12 on the Meretz list?” sneered one friend. “She never had a chance of getting elected anyway”), while Arabs wondered why the hell she was a member of a Zionist party in the first place.

Karen Alkalay-Gut, a professor of English literature at Tel Aviv University,  has published a letter from one of her Arab students on her blog. “…there is no one who is right and no one who is wrong, there is no good guy and no bad guy and what’s happening is inhumane from both sides..,” he writes. Read the rest here (scroll down to January 4 entry).

Sayed Kashua, a novelist who writes in Hebrew, wrote a brilliant satirical piece for Haaretz about the military operation in Gaza. Apparently inspired by Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Sayed’s piece includes this paragraph:

So now I am telling you: Our aim is to grind them into the dust. We will soften them up with missiles until they understand that for every blasted Qassam they let fly at us, they will get a hundred tons in their face. And it won’t end, either. Who said it has to end? Hey, the rules of the game have changed. How long can you be good to them? Hey, was there a cease-fire? There was. What happened? All they did was figure out how to plan the next blow. So we didn’t open the transit points? Is that our fault? They brought Hamas on themselves. Let them deal. Click here to read the entire article.

Unfortunately, an appreciation for fine satire seems to be increasingly rare in our self-righteous corner of the globe. Things got so bad, with Arabs calling Kashua a monster and Jews calling him a fifth columnist, that the soft-spoken writer felt compelled to defend himself in this interview, broadcast yesterday evening on Channel 2. It’s clear that the host, Oded Ben-Ami, sympathizes with Kashua. But he still had to ask the insulting question, “Do you have the same feeling [of sorrow over Palestinian deaths] when you see news of a rocket falling on Sderot, or on a kindergarten (God forbid)?” Kashua’s answer: “I think that’s the wrong way of looking at the matter. I think non-combatants should be excluded from this conflict completely.” Then he added that he agreed with Barack Obama, who visited Sderot and famously said that he would do everything to protect his daughters if someone was shooting rockets at them. “Everything,” says Kashua, “Includes attempts to negotiate…and it certainly does not include killing 300 people in one day, killing children and entire famlies with bombardments. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no difference between the IDF saying it accidentally killed families while targetting Hamas militants, and Hamas militants claiming that rockets which hit Sderot were meant for a nearby military base.”

The Arab man from Ramle who sells me fresh eggs and home-cured olives from his stall in the Carmel Market just smiled at me sadly as he weighed the olives and then added a few more, as he always does. “Let’s hope for better times,” he said. Meanwhile, a friend asked me to visit someone she was close to, a wounded Gazan man who had been evacuated to a Tel Aviv-area hospital. Which reminds me: I have been trying without success to obtain a laptop for him, so that he can follow the news on the internet. If anyone in the Tel Aviv area has a spare laptop to lend him for a week or so, please send me an email.

On last Tuesday’s episode of Eretz Nehederet, the country’s most popular satire show, one of the skits, “The Big Restaurant,” is about an Arab restaurateur in Akko (Acre/Akka) and his Jewish customers. Ali Hamoudi’s  traditional Arab restaurant has been empty since the Yom Kippur riots, which scared away the Jewish customers upon whom he depends for a livelihood (in Arabic, Hamoudi is derived from the name Mahmoud; but in Hebrew it means “cutie,” an endearment usually directed at a child). So when a stylishly dressed yuppie couple and their two children timorously enter the restaurant, he does everything to relax them. “You are in good hands,” he says, piling traditional appetizers and far too many main courses on their table. The macho husband, Shmulik, tells his neurotic wife Dalia, “I told you there was nothing to worry about. These are Christian Arabs. They love us.” But in the end Ali Hamoudi and his staff are so delighted to have customers that they freak the couple out with their hospitality overkill. Dalia and Shmulik end up running away from Ali Hamoudi’s restaurant. Since the entire episode of Eretz Nehederet was about the war (which was only in its fourth day), the unspoken question seems to be, “What will happen to Arab-Jewish relations now, with the war in Gaza?”

And in a final twist of unintended irony, the new season of Survivor, the reality show that takes place on a Caribbean island, started off with its first-ever female Muslim contestant – Nasreen Ghandour. The daughter of a university professor from Haifa, she has two graduate degrees and once aspired to be the first Muslim flight attendant for El Al. She’s also gorgeous.

Nasreen Ghandour, first Muslim on Survivor

Nasreen was voted off the show during the first week of the Gaza operation (uh, everyone knows the show was recorded a few months ago, right?), but first there was quite a bit of sexual tension between her and a macho gungh-ho army guy from a West Bank settlement. File under “complexities and anomalies of Israeli society.”

Eamonn asked me on the second day of the war why I was, according to my Twitter status, “outside the consensus.” On that day, when we were told that all those people killed in the initial bombardments were Hamas militants (later we found out that those men in uniform were actually a class of newly trained civil police at their graduation ceremony), I outlined my views in an email that morphed into a guest post on the Z blog. As you will see, I took a pragmatic stance. Mohamed said it doesn’t sound like me; too cold, he said.

The thing is, I’ve noticed that the response to an ethical argument against the war tends to be derision at best. Some people become absolutely enraged. An expression of compassion for the people of Gaza is interpreted as an expression of indifference to the people of Sderot and the rest of the southern towns under bombardment from Hamas operatives in Gaza. I find this reaction astonishing and sometimes frightening. On more than one occasion, some people I was actually friends with turned absolutely psychotic – attacking me in writing, yelling at me and accusing me of being a Hamas supporter – just because I said that I oppose this war.

Over the past 11 days, more than 600 Gazans have been killed and around 4,000 injured. Entire families have been wiped out. Parents have lost all their children in one split second. Schools packed with refugees looking for a safe haven from the bombardments have been hit by artillery shells that killed dozens of people and wounded many more. The hospitals are completely overwhelmed. Buildings have collapsed on multi-generation families of 52 members, killing them all at once. Given these circumstances, in addition to those  described above, I feel compelled to speak out – even though I know that my voice will not make any difference. As my sister put it, after musing about why she had not attended any protest marches in Toronto, “In Israel, however, where you can say ‘I love Israel, I deplore these actions’ – here I would have marched.” And so I marched: because I love Israel, but I deplore its actions in Gaza.

Today I watched two video clips that affected me strongly. The first is a Channel 2 news report about the soldiers who were killed by friendly fire. In a typical cross-section of Israeli society, they include a religious-national (“settler”) soldier whose first child was born four months ago, a secular guy from the center of the country and a 19 year-old Druze. The interviews with the bereaved families are hearbreaking. Sobbing, the Druze soldier’s younger brother, Amir, chokes out, “I don’t know how I will live without him. And I hope he is the last soldier killed in this war.”

The second clip, from SKY news, is an interview with Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert, who has been working at a Gaza hospital since December 31. Watch:

Dr. Gilbert’s report, on top of all the information I’ve obtained from friend in Gaza (before the phone lines were cut off) and international media reports, leads me to conclude that the cost of this military action – justified or not – is too high. Whether intended or not, our army’s actions are causing unspeakable suffering to innocent people. This must stop.

Even the military experts interviewed ad nauseum on Channels 1, 2 and 10 confirm that the best we can do is “change the reality” for a few months, until Hamas regroups and attacks again. Surely this does not justify sending teenage soldiers to fight and die; surely we cannot shrug off the fact that the bombardments have caused enormous suffering to the ordinary people of Gaza.  I do not understand why people I know and respect and love – doting parents, generous friends, intelligent, educated people – fold their arms over their chests and look away from the suffering of Gazan civilians. “Well,” said one friend, “I am sorry for them, but they should not have voted for Hamas.”

“They started it”; “but they’re terrorists”; and “it’s worse in Darfur” are not, in my opinion, intelligent responses. I do not live in Darfur. I am a voting, tax-paying citizen of Israel, so this is where I have the moral obligation to speak out when I see something that is wrong.

Yes, Hamas is a bunch of fanatic thugs. I remember that they threw Fateh people off of multi-story buildings during the July 2007 coup. I know that they use civilians as human shields. I do understand that Israel has got itself caught in a struggle between Iran, which is funding Hamas, and the Arab states, which hate Hamas and fear Iran. And yes, Hamas could stop the war if they would just cease firing the rockets. But they will not do that. So it is up to us: we have it in our power to stop the killing. We can stop the war. And we should stop it, immediately. For their sake and for ours.

Because it is undermining our morality. Because it is costing us hundreds of millions of shekels. Because it is a shocking waste of life, money and goodwill from moderate Arabs. Because if we plan to live in this neighbourhood called the Middle East for the long term, we need to find a modus vivendi with our neighbours. We needn’t love one another. We just need to stop killing each other. And to those who say one cannot negotiate with a terror organization that refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist, my response is – perhaps you are right; but have you tried?

I’ve been writing this blog post for days, which is why it is so long. If you are still with me, thank you. And if you are curious about mainstream sentiment toward the war, I recommend the blogs of Liza and Israeli Mom. Both express regret for the suffering of Palestinians, alongside a belief that the war is necessary. As Liza put it in a IM chat yesterday, “I love you, but I totally disagree with you.”

Below is a summary of Israeli blogs and other media sources that express a more definitive anti-war stance.

Blogger Shuki Galili put together a list of 80 Hebrew-language bloggers who are against the war. The black-white-red poster at the bottom of his post reads, “Civilians are not cannon fodder. Not in Gaza. Not in Sderot.”

Attorney Jonathan Klinger explains his opposition in this self-translated post (from the Hebrew), Between Gnosis and Genocide.

And here he is again, at the same anti-war demo that I attended, explaining in his typically articulate fashion why the war is such a bad idea. Uri Avnery, Ibtisam Maraana and several others make their own interesting observations. Recommended. (Thanks, Yishay!)

Well-known Haaretz journalist Avirama Golan moved last year to Sderot in order to express her solidarity. She writes a blog about life in Sderot in Hebrew. And she is certainly not the only Sderot resident who opposes the war.

Bloggers opposed to the war who write in English:

• Freelance journalist Ido Levin (see also this post on the mainstream Israeli media’s largely uncritical coverage of the war);
• Daniella Cheslow,  at The Truth Herzl;
• Yohay E.,  at Things.co.il;
• Yudit Ilany,  at OCCUPIED;
• Yuval Ben-Ami, at Everywhere;
• Leila Segal, at The Other Side;
• Bernard Avishai;
• Haim Watzman at South Jerusalem;
• Yishay Mor, at YabaYaba;
• Life Goes on in Gaza and Sderot is co-authored by a Palestinian from Gaza and an Israeli from Sderot. They call themselves Hope Man and Peace Man.

Besides a few articles in The City (Tel Aviv) and some other weekly publications that have limited-to-no online presence, some of Time Out Tel Aviv’s regular columnists wrote critically about the military operation in this week’s edition.

• On pages 14-15 there are interviews with Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, who recently traveled illegally to Gaza by boat (Israeli law forbids its citizens to enter Gaza), only to be kicked out by Hamas a few days later.
• On page 34, Boaz Gaon’s weekly column begins, “As I write these lines, in my pastoral house surrounded by the hush of a peaceful night that seems to stretch in all directions, Gazan parents are hugging their children and promising them, in vain, that everything will be alright.”
• Gal Uchovsky writes (page 146), “We are hearing the usual slogans: ‘So what do you expect us to do when rockets are falling on Ashdod?’ ‘We withdrew from Gaza, isn’t that enough for them?’ ‘We gave them everything, they are responsible!’ Go ahead, try and argue. Israel had become such a selfish place, so narcissistic, that it is very difficult to explain what is wrong with the strongest army in the Middle East bombing the hell out of areas that are full of civilians, while there aren’t even enough medical supplies in the hospitals.”

I mentioned the Arab restaurant skit in last week’s Eretz Nehederet above. To end this epic post, below is another skit in the same episode. Here is comedian Tal Friedman’s brilliant portrayal of Ehud Barak giving a mock “press conference” about the war. Remember that it was conceived and recorded only three days after the campaign began. So far, events are evolving in tandem with the predictions outlined in the skit.

Click here to watch the clip with subtitles. For some reason, they don’t show up in the embedded version.