"Zero" Comfort in an "Area of Darkness"

I am standing at a 45 degree angle to the horizontal and my hands are holding on to the little hand holds to steady myself. The next moment I am at a 135 degree angle in the opposite direction and the only thing steadying me is the small handle to which there are five other claimants. “Not an issue, not an issue, please adjust.” Through a small opening in the crowd I can see several men with cheap rexine bags who have tried to squeeze in but are now standing with sour expressions on their faces.

A man, a puny-looking man, with a severe pinched sort of expression is trying to do the impossible – he is trying to read a newspaper. My face is slammed against the back of his head, one eye is peeping from beside his neck into the headlines:

“Job cuts, indices down, bankruptcy, scams, bombs, rogues, talibanisation, etc.” they stare at me. Talibanisation, nice word, a nice word with a dangerous intent, or religious bigotry, to be exact. It’s in churches, temples, viharas, masjids and gurdwaras in equal measure.

Nothing makes sense anymore. The compartment is dark, there’s only the sound of the fans, rumbling clatter of rails and whooshing wind, and stray lambent light from outside that creeps in from the windows. One man says, “It’s like a cattle transport, these trains.” The space to move around is rare and “zero” in here, and we all bear it with closed eyes and muttered obscene invectives.

I manage a weak smile and say, “No it’s worse. In a cattle bogie, there’s a rule that not more than x number of cows/sheep should be accommodated. Here, it’s the more the merrier.”

He nods and then his face disappears as the crowd pushes and churns, hands, feet do a dance, several curses follow, fat paunches shift and extricate themselves from secure “dovetailing” they had formed with other similar paunches and then proceed towards the door. What’s the hustle all about?

Kurla. The dirty and littered and grimy station crawls near in from the dense urban undergrowth of wires, railway tracks, stanchions and signals.

Kurla, in my childhood I would pass this station on the way to church, this decrepit station has assumed something of a star status with the coming of Andheri (meaning darkness), Mumbai’s own “area of darkness”. It’s a nightmare of grimy, badly maintained buildings accessed by bad roads, which have uncleared debris, gravel and sand dumped on them everyday. If you walk on one of these roads you would be struck down in seconds if you aren’t watchful and acrobatic enough to jump out of death’s swift progress. These roads aren’t cleaned, litter lies everywhere. Exactly the reason I call this “area of darkness”, because I used to work there. If it’s late in the evening you don’t get transport, it becomes something like an Indian village after 8 p.m., deserted roads, no taxis or rickshaws, and stray big shots in their safely air-conditioned cars.

Exactly why I call this an “area of darkness”. Get it?

It’s hard to imagine this churning flesh going to this “area of darkness” with such devotion, day after day after day. I am not wonderstruck or awed because I was one such person not long ago. But in this “area of darkness” are situated the sweatshops that churn out the developed world’s software systems, their seemingly faultless high-tech genetic research software (I wrote stuff for such a company). They are such bloody good programmers, their code is so systematic and free from bugs and syntactical errors, but when it comes to bring some order into the roads outside their office, they are a pretty big “zero.”

And “zero” is what they care for the roads in Andheri because they will be going and settling in the Yoonited States in a few years from now. So what do they care? They can stand at 45 degree and 135 degree angles for a few months, “not an issue” as they say in Bombay officialese. I won’t vouch for the grammatical correctness of this term which is in the mouth every office drone these days.

En Passant...

While I don’t know who is right or who is wrong in the beating up of women who drank liquor in a Mangalore bar, I know this and am making this request: Please don’t bring this rather tranquil town to disrepute. I like and love Mangalore as I have passed it several times on the way to Kerala and love its soft-spoken people and their sweet nature.

The hasbara spin operation of Alan Dershowitz is crumbling...

Here is an excellent article in Counterpunch.org by Mr. Franklin Lamb who drafted the International Criminal Court submission on behalf of HOKOK, the International Coalition against Impunity, seeking to bring Israel before the Court for International Crimes in Gaza.

"Beirut.

"There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances. The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable."

-- Professor Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

In the minds of some of his colleagues, and a law student reporter at the Harvard Law Record, Professor Alan Dershowitz's unique views of Israel's obligations under international law are reflected in the "private legal memoranda" that he churns out from time to time in his moonlighting job as "Of Counsel to the Government of Israel". In this role, as one of his former students explained, Harvard's Nutty Professor advises Israel "how to appear to be acting legally to the eyes of the American public".

One recent bit of international legal advice that Dershowitz is said to be particularly proud of is his recent Memorandum regarding the current 'Legal Standard' identifying those who the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) can 'legally' target in Gaza. These days one can witness his opus mini being read word for word off a cue card by IDF spokesman, Benjamin Rutland.

Mr. Rutland, speaking on January 3, 2009 to FOX TV by video-link, read to the interviewer,

"Our definition of who we can legally target is that it can be anyone, I repeat, anyone, who is involved in any way, as the Government of Israel shall determine, with terrorism or who supports Hamas, in any qualitative way. That person obviously becomes a lawful target. This ranges from the strictly military institutions and includes the political institutions that provide the logistical funding and human resources for the terrorist arm of Hamas."

The extremely broad scope of the IDF's new 'legal standard' would appear to mean that Israel can now legally kill anyone in Gaza including the 48 civilians seeking shelter in UNWRA's Fakhura girls elementary school or the three members of the Al-Sultan family, 15 hours earlier, as they emerged from the toilets in the courtyard of Asma school, in the Shati refugee camp north of Gaza City.
Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law, University College London notes, "Once you extend the definition of combatants in the way that IDF is doing and associate individuals who are only indirectly or peripherally involved, it becomes an open-ended definition, which undermines the very object and purpose of the rules that are intended to be applied."

As chance would have it, Mr. Rutland turned out to be the same IDF spokesman who asserted, on the evening of January 6, 2009 that "beyond any doubt militants fired mortars from inside the UN school compound thereby completely justifying the IDF returning fire on the school".

But Mr. Rutland and the IDF cooked their 'court filing' by offering phony footage. Huge mistake. Given that the international press is barred from Gaza, with the exception that on January 7, 2009, the IDF did allow three chosen 'embedded journalists' to join them, the IDF apparently thought they could foist off some old file footage from nearly two years ago which Mr. Rutland claimed showed militants in the school compound and carrying what may have been military equipment.

Immediately the UN cried 'Hoax!" and Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) expressed outrage as he disclosed that the 'demonstrative evidence' "was from 2007 video and bears no connection to Tuesday's military strike on the school".

On the morning of January 7, 2009, after a UN investigation, UNRWA announced that "we're 99.9% sure that no militants were at the Fakhura girl's elementary school." The agency questioned survivors, including UNRWA staff that run the school under U.N. auspices and "who knew virtually all of the civilians who were seeking shelter form Israeli bombs and shelling."

Mr. Gunness, at a press conference on the afternoon, January 7, broadcast by Press TV requested that the IDF or anyone with relevant information, to please submit the evidence so that it might help the UN with a resolution of the "point one percent remaining doubt".

Gunness also stated that UNRWA gave the IDF the coordinates of all of the 23 schools that are serving as refuges for the 14,000 people nearby forced to flee their homes. While Mr. Gunness is far too polite to say so, each of the schools hit on Tuesday housed about 400 people seeking shelter from American-gifted planes, bombs, artillery shells, missiles and perhaps yet to be proven, internationally banned White Phosphorus, in the service of Israel.

Law Checks

In his January 2, 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled 'Israel's Policy Is Perfectly Proportionate', Professor Alan Dershowitz defends Israel's operation "Molten Lead" in Gaza and while doing so consistently misstates and misapplies the Principles, Standards and Rules of International Law as well as their moral underpinnings.

Alan Dershowitz:

"Israel's actions in Gaza are justified under international law, and Israel should be commended for its self-defense against terrorism. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks. The only limitation international law places on a democracy are that its actions must satisfy the principle of proportionality."

Law Check:

Leaving aside Dershowitz's misapplication of the term 'terrorism', the fact is that Article 51 of the UN Charter was drafted with Nazi Germany in mind and to support those who have the full right, duty, and backing of International law to resist illegal occupation. Article 51 is to be employed precisely to encourage resistance to the kind of aggression and invasions Israel has launched for more than 40 years. Article 51, and the international customary law on which it is based, gives Israel's neighbors, both UN members and non-members, the right of self-defense against unlawful Israeli aggressions outlawed by UN Charter Article (2) (4).

Additionally, the legal obligation of Proportionality applies to all States, not just those Dershowitz erroneously asserts i.e. "places on a Democracy" and especially, one could argue, on Apartheid states like Israel and the former regime in South Africa.

Professor Dershowitz refers to the Principle of Proportionality as if this black letter law is some sort of idealistic philosophical abstraction. The Proportionality Standard, or Rule or Law is key to the enforcement of post-World War II international norms of civilized conduct and violation of it creates eligibility for criminal indictment and arrest warrants from the Office of the Prosecutor of International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Alan Dershowitz:

"The claim that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality by killing more Hamas terrorists than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets -- is absurd. First, there is no legal equivalence between the deliberate killing of innocent civilians and the deliberate killings of Hamas combatants".

Law Check:

Few, if anyone at all, have ever made the silly legal claim Professor Dershowitz floats. Here he simply employs a legal fiction 'red herring' and erects a 'straw man' to offer a spurious argument on Israelis' behalf.

Proportionality does not require numerical equivalence but contrary to what Dershowitz implies, it clearly does not allow countless killings of civilians to avenge the death or capture of an Israeli soldier. Every Israeli act whether it is ethnic cleansing, occupation, massacre or wanton destruction is consistently portrayed by Professor Dershowitz as perfectly legal, morally just and as a pure act of self-defense reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war against the worst kind of human beings imaginable.

Alan Dershowitz:

"Under the laws of war, any number of combatants can be killed to prevent the killing of even one innocent civilian".

Law Check:

This statement is nonsense on its face and totally ignores the key International Law requirements of proportionality and distinguishing combatants from non-combatants. With respect to Gaza, clearly rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that does not give rise to any Israeli right, either as Occupying Power or State, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in a frenzied response as it clearly did in Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006 and is currently engaged in with Gaza.

Admittedly, International Humanitarian Law and the Rome Statute permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur. The crime occurs when there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) (Article 8(2)(b)(i)) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the reasonable knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality) (Article 8(2)(b)(iv). Article 8(2)(b)(iv) criminalizes:
Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
Article 8(2)(b)(iv) draws on the principles in Article 51(5)(b) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, but restricts the criminal prohibition to cases that are "clearly" excessive.

The application of Article 8(2) (b) (iv) requires, inter alia, an assessment of:

(a) the anticipated civilian damage or injury;
(b) the anticipated military advantage;
(c) and whether (a) was "clearly excessive" in relation to (b).

It's beginning to look a lot like Genocide!

Professor Dershowitz in seeking to exempt Israel from the requirements of International Law has consistently argued that since Israel has not signed the Rome Statute and has not submitted to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, that Israel is not bound by the Rome Statute's International Law as noted below. He errs in his interpretation of the Rules of International Law and is quite mistaken that the provisions of the Rome Statute do not apply to Israel.

International Customary Law i.e. legal norms accepted by the vast majority of States, plus the United Nations, are binding on all States, including Israel. The Rome Statute does not make new law like, for example, some contract that Israel would have to sign in order to be bound by it. All states are bound by the law restated in Treaty form in the Rome Statute. Its binding provisions include Article 7and Article 8 very applicable to the current carnage raging in Gaza.

Given that the Rome Statute imbued the International Criminal Court with 'Universal Jurisdiction' over all people and given further that the Rome Statute rejects Impunity for any person, which Israel has consistently used, for example in US Courts such as the recent Qana Case brought by the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights, Israeli leaders are now bound and can be tried jointly, severally and personally in the Hague. So can George W. Bush and Mohammad Hosni Mubarak even though neither country has yet become a signatory of the Rome Statute.

Article 7 of the Rome Statute, outlaws "a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population', which involves "persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender" grounds ." Such projects, to which Palestinians have been subjected for more than 60 years, constitute a crime against humanity.

What Israel has been doing in Gaza and Palestine comes very close to genocide according to the provisions of the Genocide Convention (1948), reiterated in the Rome Charter of the International Criminal Court (2002), which includes: '(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part' (6). Some of Professor Dershowitz's colleagues consider that the launching of rockets into Israel by Hamas, like the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, constitute a legitimate response to impending extermination and are a desperate bid for survival.

Alan Dershowitz:

"Under international law, Israel is not required to allow Hamas to play Russian roulette with Jewish children's lives".

Law Check:

One of Alan Dershowitz's nemeses, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Professor Richard Falk, accuses Israel of the following indictable crimes in Gaza which are not Russian roulette:

· Collective punishment - the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants in direct violation of the absolute prohibition of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention.

· Targeting civilians - the airstrikes are aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world…"

· Disproportionate military response - the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza's elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians.
Other indictable crimes Israel is committing daily in Gaza include intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives.

Additionally, Professor Dershowitz ignores other violations of International Law by Israel in Gaza which fail to spare the civilian population, including, but not limited to, the following failures to act in accordance with the International Law of Armed Conflict while his "Perfectly Proportionate" judgment, yet again, exonerates Israel:

* Ignoring the prohibition against attacks that target or indiscriminately harm civilians and the requirement to distinguish at all times between civilians and combatants.

* Failure to adhere to the prohibition against disproportionate attacks by not launching any attack that may be expected to cause harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

* Failure to ensure the unhindered movement of medical personnel and ambulances to carry out their duties and of wounded persons to access medical care. Any restrictions on movement for genuine security grounds must be temporary, subject to regular review, and imposed only to the extent absolutely necessary.

* Failure to refrain from using "human shields" and by compelling Palestinian civilians to remain inside homes or other structures taken over by the IDF for military operations.

* Failing to take all necessary steps to ensure that the civilian population has access to sufficient food, medical care, and other essential humanitarian goods and services.

* Failure to allow journalists and humanitarian agencies access to Gaza and ensure that any restrictions on access and movement for genuine security grounds be temporary, subject to regular review, and only imposed to the extent absolutely necessary.

Alan Dershowitz concludes:

"Until the world recognizes that Hamas is committing three war crimes -- targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member state of the United Nations -- and that Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue".

Professor Dershowitz's conclusion makes plain his 40-year thesis that Israel is above, and immune from, international law as well as his profound personal lack of respect for post-World War II international legal norms.

As an ultra-Zionist, what he insists is akin to "the law is what I tell you it is! And why can't the World understand that!" While cherry picking, mischaracterizing and misapplying International Law, Professor Dershowitz ignores what every Law School and University teaches on the subject.

Should he spend more time in the Harvard Law School library, and less in TV studios, he would surely learn that an objective application of international legal norms to the conduct of Israel is Gaza would result its leaders being indicted and brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague."


On January 15, 2009, lawyers from HOKOK will ask the Court to investigate Reports of the use of internationally banned weapons, including White Phosphorus, in Gaza. Lamb is a former adjunct Professor of international law at Northwestern College of Law in Portland, Oregon. He is currently doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@sabrashatila.org

ei: Why Israel won't survive

ei: Why Israel won't survive

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Oh Gaza!

I am seated on rubble and ashes
I don't know if Aya my doll is still in my arms
I still can hear the talks, the whispers and the crying of latest days
And the laughs of other times
I still hear the familiar call for praying, the sounds of the house …

I hope to see my family and my friends soon
so we can run and laugh as we used to do,
each day a new world…

Now it is all rubble and ashes
and me half seated, half buried in it
My name is Samar, I was six
I lived in innocence
I died in Gaza.

(Written by WDA. - Gaza)

Satyam, Oh! Satyam!

Satyam! Oh, Satyam! The word means truth, but what a pack of lies it has dealt to investors, the people who sunk the sweat of their brows, harvest of their fallow fields. I don’t have to say much about it, it’s already no brainers by now, I guess. It’s shocking how a company that had ranked with Infosys and Wipro in the IT space has fallen so low and its chairman is now in jail. Investors used to boast they are buying Satyam, Infosys and Wipro at one time. Why did this goliath of the stock market, so full of hope for the future, so fattened by profits fall from grace all of a sudden. It focuses on the muddle that the Indian financial system is reeling under. I guess there are more skeletons in the closet that would tumble out soon. I got this in a joke forwarded to me this morning “PROFIT -- An archaic word no longer in use.” Yes, only if corporations concentrated on making profits for themselves instead of using people’s money to make losses and manipulate figures to drive up market capitalisation. Tall order? Not exactly!

Some days back I attended a reading of poetry organised by P.E.N. at the Theosophy Hall, near where I work. All the known names in poetry from the city were there and Jeet had come from Bangalore, and Ravi Shankar had come from the US (He is founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat (www.drunkenboat.com). Wonder why poetry readings attract a sparse audience of the city’s ageing, greying population. One greying gentleman wore his wrist watch, not on his wrist, but on his belt. The occasion was the reading of Ravi’s anthology “Language for a New Century,” a weighty tome costing Rs 1350, available at a discount for Rs 1250. Can’t afford it at that price! Was poetry being ignored because books of poetry were so expensive? I saw Jeet Thayil read for the first time and I think he is a good performer. Nodded at Annie, Jane left early, Adil, Sampurna, Priya were the people I could identify from photographs.

On the way home a thought struck me and I wrote it down. There’s a passage in the “White Tiger” (Guess I am too much in awe of Balram Halwai and his character) that I will use to illustrate this. Adiga compares lives of people who live in flats and cars to eggs with a hard shell on the exterior and all mush inside. He talks of how the hard shell breaks and exposes the tender inside to the tough, inhospitable outside and how this involves trauma and dithering. Adiga ably captures how Ashok goes into depression and dither after his wife runs her car over an urchin on the road and then him – meaning Ashok.

When the terror attack occurred something similar happened in Bombay. Rich men (builders, businessmen, leading luminaries) found that their money couldn’t buy them security and that they were equally vulnerable to the twenty-first century’s biggest bane – terrorism. Most of these people have been living in an egg shell so far and didn’t know their lives could be in danger.

In Passing...
A few days back I saw the movie “Idiocracy.” A must watch for all those spelling challenged morons who are growing up writing and thinking in SMSese. Could be the dystopia we all fear could happen if SMSese is given much tenure in this world. And now they are having SMS poetry, too!

A Professional's Guide to Commuting in Bombay!

To this post about commuting in New York by Pragya Thakur (Oh! no, not that one, this one moderates Shakespeare & Co. with the dedoubtable James Joyce alias KVK Murthy). I am regular griper on Twitter about the morning commute. Only today I had a huge fight with a man who tried, successfully, to block me from occupying a vacant seat, a precious piece of real estate in the morning madness (sorry, rush). I became so mad and all het up that I shouted at him, which is what I do when I lose my abundant cool and zen. Hmm, created a scene, sigh! Lost my zen for a few minutes as I stood there quivering and arguing while an opportunistic smart fart coolly sat on the seat in question.

Here's my reply to Pragya Thakur:

"Common problem, rain here sleet in New York. What I do is make sure I have only one piece of luggage with me, i.e., a biggish haversack that can hold a laptop, an umbrella, a purse containing chequbooks and stuff, a torch (yes there are powercuts to think about), glue stick, diary, notebook, stray credit card payments that i have forgotten to drop in the ATM box, lunch box, all this nicely tucked into one big haver sack that I can sling around both shoulders (so no slipping and sliding you see!). I also do a risky jumping into the compartment before the train stops at Victoria Terminus (the station which terrorists attacked recently), and this would be impossible without this contraption - I can bash my competitors for a seat (by the window) with my biggish haversack. I smash into them, hold the dividing rod, push myself in and then do an impossible dive for a window seat. It's risky, don't try it if you aren't an expert in it.

"As for umbrella I buy sturdy three-folding "John's Umbrellas" when I go to Kerala, which are very good, as they are made from some carbon-titanium alloy. All decent Mallus swear by this modern invention of tropical-climate-oriented ingenuity. They fold three times and is neatly tucked into a side pocket of the haversack so that I don't have to open my bag when it rains. Rain? Draw, unfurl, switch the button, it opens like a dream! Would suggest you buy this marvel of tropical thunderstorms when you are in India.

"As for shoes my Bata "Hush Puppies" are so sturdy and sleek that I can step into water with it, give it a shine the next day, and lo and behold, it shines as if it is new! Would suggest you buy sturdy Bata shoes when you are in India next. On casual days I wear "Woodlands" shoes which are comfortable, tough, has traction on soles, and feels as if I am floating when I walk.

"Remember, carry only one piece of luggage, big enough for all your things and you commute like a professional. After all, this comes a professional with twenty nine years of experience. I can vouch that the Bombay commute is a bigger hazard than the New York one."

Hypothetically Speaking...

I have just stumbled upon a great blog that I think you should see. This blog is written by Diane Mason and she has some very important things to say. Primarily about the current massacre in gaza. I am taking the liberty of cross posting her article from her site (and I do hope that you will visit her blog, too).

Here is Diane:

"The stupidest defense of what Israel is doing to Gaza has to be, "But what would Americans do if Canadians were firing Qassams from Quebec over the border into the U.S.?". Well, I dunno. Flesh out your scenario for me. While these imaginary rockets are falling on the U.S. from Quebec, is the U.S. blockading Quebec and conducting a violent, repressive military occupation of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and all points north, that has been going on for 41 years, and involves the forcible dispossession of the Canadians in those provinces so that Americans can steal their choicest land and the U.S. can annex it (without the inconvenience of having to give citizenship rights to the Canadian people who live there)? Because that's what it would take for your comparison to have meaning. And if you tell me "Yes, actually we are doing all that to the people who are launching home-made, sugar-fueled rockets at us", then I think the answer to the question "What would Americans do?" might well be that if I were doing that to Canada and only getting a bunch of Qassam rockets in return, I might just shrug my shoulders and think maybe I'd gotten off lightly.

Beyond the occupation as the immediate context for the inherently violent and unstable relationship between the Gaza Strip and Israel, there's a broader context that is unmentionable in U.S. news media, but got an airing yesterday in the Hebrew-language version of Ha'aretz (via skyredoubt, via the incomparable Mondo Weiss). Returning to our Canada analogy, there's something else I need to ask if I really want to know why those nasty Canadians are lobbing rockets at me. I need to know not only whether the U.S. is occupying and blockading the people who fire the rockets, but whether in your analogy the very existence of the United States depends on the continuous expulsion, dispossession and disenfranchisement of Canadians, as Israel's does in regard to the Palestinians. If you leave that bit out of the comparison, then you're really only telling me half a story about why these people might want to fire rockets at me.

In the U.S., all our TV pundits and major newspapers ever tell us about the Gaza Strip is that 1. it's a Hamas stronghold, and 2. it's the most densely-populated piece of real estate on earth. But they don't tell us that it wasn't always like that. They don't mention that Gaza wasn't a stronghold of Islamic nationalism till Israel's occupation administration in Gaza funded Hamas as a counterweight to the secular nationalism of the PLO, then engaged in a phony 15-year "peace process" that hopelessly compromised the secular nationalist parties that had supported a compromise peace with Israel, leaving Hamas as the only credible resistance to the continuing occupation.

They don't tell you either about the time before the Gaza Strip became the most densely-populated place on earth; when Gaza was a small coastal city, rather than a moon scape,and its environs were wheat fields and orchards - cultivating citrus products, dates, grapes, figs and mulberries - rather than refugee camps.

And they DEFINITELY don't mention how the transformation in Gaza's fortunes came about. They don't tell you where those 1.5 million people now squashed into the Gaza Strip came from. Because they come from what is now Israel, and they didn't leave their homes there voluntarily in order to spend their days in an overcrowded, bombarded slum. Eighty per cent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees. These are the people who have been expelled from Israel since 1948, and always had to be expelled according to the logic of Zionism, if a Jewish state was to be created in Palestine, where most people happen not to be Jewish. The vast majority of the people in the Gaza Strip are the original inhabitants of the towns and villages of southern and coastal Israel, who took refuge from Zionist armies in Gaza City because it was the last southern city left in Palestinian hands in 1948.

In short, the people in the Gaza Strip who are today firing rockets at the towns of southern Israel are, overwhelmingly, the children and grandchildren of the Palestinian people who were expelled by Israel from those very same towns in order to gerrymander a Jewish majority where one did not naturally exist.

Yesterday, rockets from Gaza fell on the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Benny Tziper in the Hebrew-language version of Ha'aretz online was the only person I saw publicly mention that the Israeli city of Ashkelon was, until quite recently, the Palestinian city of Majdal al-Asqalan whose Arab population was expelled within the lifetime of many present-day Israelis to the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip:

[...]A nice man was there at the entrance to the museum, an invalid of IDF from the Yom Kippur War, who was born and lived all his life in Ashkelon. From his knowledge and enthusiasm one could tell that he loves the city very much. He had no problem telling me how in 1953 the Arabs were expelled, and the long process of looking for a new name for the place started (the Arab name was Majdl), till it was decided to call the place Ashkelon. The entire communications between the authorities regarding the cleansing of the city of Arabs and Hebrewisation of the name is exhibited in the museum. I think that nobody makes the connection today between the fact that the Qassams land on Ashkelon and the fact that poor Arabs who did nothing wrong to anybody were put on trucks and expelled from their city to Gaza fifty five years ago, and since then they are there and Ashkelon is here. And this did not happen in wartime or as a result of hostilities, but from a cold calculation that the area must be cleansed of Arabs. There is a picture in the museum that shows the Arabs sitting and waiting in front of the of Israeli military government building. It sends shivers down my spine because it happens in the year I was born. And it is really, really hard for me to realize that at the time that my parents were happy with my birth, other people were put on trucks and expelled from their homes.[...]

Those "poor Arabs who did nothing wrong to anybody" yet "were put on trucks and expelled from their city" because of a "cold calculation that the area must be cleansed of Arabs" are people like Salim al-Damagh and Sayyed al-Sharief,who are now aged 70 and 76 respectively and who, 55 years after being expelled, are still unable to return to Ashkelon because Zionism says they have the "wrong" ethnic-religious background to be allowed to live in their own homes.

Also yesterday, Qassam rockets again fell on the oft-bombarded Israeli town of Sderot. Sderot was built as an Israeli town in the early 1950's to house Jewish immigrants from the Maghreb, who were told they were coming to a land without a people for a people without a land. But they weren't; they were coming to the ruins of the Palestinian town of Najd. A little town by the name of Sderot became home to poor immigrants in the early '50s, only years after it had been cleared of Palestinians living in what was the village of Najd. [A] resident of Sderot told me that when he got there in 1989 he thought he was in "the safest place in the world, in the middle of nowhere." And yet, it was not the middle of nowhere, he had moved onto what was once someone else's land and adjacent to where that displaced person and their displaced descendants were held imprisoned. There, his displaced neighbors daily face the consequences of the past. This past is what is allowing for the hell of that very town, Sderot.

- Sderot Created The Gaza Strip by Philip Rizk; 22 May 2007.

Najd was completely destroyed, and its 719 inhabitants expelled to Gaza, by troops of the Israeli Negev Brigade, on 13 May 1948.

By 1998 there were an estimated 4,417 people living in Gaza Strip refugee camps who were either expelled from Najd, or the children/grandchildren of people expelled from Najd. Conceivably, some of them are among the people firing Qassams at Sderot right now.

That sort of background information makes the Canada analogy sound really dumb, doesn't it? And you can learn it from a newspaper in Israel, but not here. At least not yet. But you will. And the reason you will hear more and more even in the U.S. about the unacknowledged history of 1948 is because of the demise of the two state solution. Israel has spent 40 years doing everything it can to erase the Green Line of 1967, in order to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. But what it has actually ended up doing by refusing to settle for the borders of 1967, is to return its conflict with the Palestinians to 1948, by unraveling the demographically Jewish state that it went to such trouble to establish through the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba. Forty years of trying to absorb the Occupied Palestinian Territories of 1967 into an expanded Jewish state of Israel, have resulted instead in the restoration of the bi-national state of Israel/Palestine that existed before 1948. A bi-national state under sectarian rule, which presently reserves the benefits of citizenship to only one of the state's nations, but a de facto bi-national state nonetheless. And as Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper has pointed out, the real irony is that Israel has no-one to blame but itself for throwing away the Jewish super-majority it created for itself on part of Palestine in 1948. Israel's own inability to untangle itself from the mirage of a Jewish state in all Palestine, has brought it to where it is today - on the verge of losing a Jewish state even on part of it:

[I]f it was we who eliminated a viable two-state solution – the creation of a truncated Palestinian prison-state on 15% of historic Palestine a la South Africa’s Bantustans will not solve the conflict – then how shall we end our century-old conflict? How shall we deal with the bi-national entity that is Israel/Palestine, largely our own creation?

In order to avoid these questions, we have developed a number of mechanisms, delaying forever a political solution being only one of them. It is enough for us to merely assert our support for a two-state solution in order that we be considered peace-minded and reasonable. Two-state supporters require only the notion of a Palestinian state, a never-ending process towards it, to escape confronting the reality we created. As long as a Palestinian state can be held out as a possibility, the pressure’s off. Thus many Israelis, Diaspora Jews and others – including such searching and otherwise radical figures as Noam Chomsky and Uri Avnery, together with Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, Rabbis Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow and members of Rabbis for Human Rights – cling tenaciously to the two-state solution, all refusing to admit it is no longer viable.

The 40th anniversary of 1967 had to do with occupation. Had we dealt with that issue wisely and justly, Israel today could have been a Jewish state living at peace with its neighbors on 78% of the Land of Israel, a true cause for celebration. This year’s focus on 60 Years, on 1948, is a different matter entirely. If we want to salvage a national Jewish presence in Palestine/Israel, nothing remains but to courageously confront what we did in 1948 and the bi-national reality we have fostered since 1967. No longer can we blame the Palestinians for our dilemmas; they accepted the two-state solution way back in 1988. No, it is we, the triumphant, those who believed (and still believe) that military power combined with Jewish victimhood can defeat a people’s will to freedom, who carry the burden of responsibility for this most anti-Zionist, yet wholly predictable, situation...

I think, I do not need to add anything more to what Diane has been saying except for this: the world community needs to challenge Israel on its terrorism in Palestine, NOW. The children of Israel have been subjugated to the worst possible treatment by the Nazis but there is no excuse today for them to subject the Palestinians to cold hearted genocide in the name of 'right'. God is not a real estate agent and that's that! period.